I was hooked from the moment I opened the book. The first line reads: “She returned to the island on Friday, August 16 on the 3pm ferry.” August 16 is my birthday, so this felt like an omen. Moreover, my sabbatical ends in August, and so, I literally found myself saying “nos vemos en agosto” when I left Vancouver last September.

The novella is about Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to the island where her mother is buried every year on her mother’s death anniversary—August 16. One year, she has an affair, and this sets off a series of annual escapades. I don’t want to spoil the ending (especially because I do recommend reading the book in any language), but I will say that AMB is on a mid-life self-discovery mission, and with time, the island romantic escapades become more profound than she was anticipating. One other parallel worth mentioning: AMB is 46 years old, the age I’ll turn when I return home next month.

Now the twist: at the time of Gabo’s death in 2014, En Agosto was “unfinished”—or rather, it was complete but still needing revision, at least in Márquez’s opinion. He stopped working on the novel around the time of the fifth version (2004), at which point he told his sons: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”

This is the other aspect that hooked me. What drove his sons to decide to agree to publishing the book 10 years after their father’s death (the book was released on GGM’s birthday)? Márquez was diagnosed with dementia in 2002. His writing ability deteriorated, but so did his judgment of his own work. Thus, his sons later reassessed the manuscript and discounted their father’s rejection of his last work—perhaps he couldn’t see the latent genius of the work.

As with the parallels to AMB’s life, this bold but clearly cautious (as evidenced by the sons’ foreword) decision captivated me. Dementia robs us of the chance to fully understand and assess the wishes of our loved one who is suffering. Gabo’s sons must have considered how much his fans would treasure this final work once released. And yet, they must have simultaneously grappled with the posthumous threatening stares from their perfectionist father. En Agosto is gleefully imperfect.

For those who don’t know GGM, he is one of the most beloved Colombians of all time. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He popularized magic realism as a genre. His books document the civil wars I referenced in my previous posts with brutal yet gentle narratives. The author of America, America described One Hundred Years of Solitude as a “literary corollary to dependency theory.”

Speaking of Colombia, you may remember that in October I was very interested to learn what Colombians thought of President Petro. His 4-year term (constitutional limit) will end en agosto 2026. My friend Abigail recently co-wrote about his legacy as Colombia’s first leftist president. In last month’s presidential elections, a Trump-backed candidate Abelardo de la Espriella narrowly defeated Iván Cepeda, Petro’s successor in Pacto Histórico. This is an unfortunate coda to my previous Latin American posts, but I’m heartened by Abigail’s assessment: Colombia has seen the political possibilities of an “explicitly redistributive, anti-extractive agenda.” Also, Petro ultimately conceded the election despite allegations of foreign interference. This is important in terms of democratic functioning, but also in relation to my thesis about losing well. 😜

Now, I’m in the US, where I continue to remind folks that this country is not the only America. Not sure if you’ve heard, but it’s kind of a big moment over here, with the 250-year anniversary of the British descendants revolting.

I arrived to the US carrying with me vestiges of my sabbatical travels—trying to hold onto some of what I’ve learned and experienced and share it with my family who live here. Last month, I had my nails painted for the Bad Bunny concert in Madrid. The colors represent the flag of the Puerto Rican independence movement—sky blue, not dark blue!—a distinction re-popularized by Benito’s Superbowl halftime show earlier this year.

When I arrived in the US, a few people asked me if I had my nails done for the 250th anniversary of July 4 (how easily the nuance of colors and flags gets missed!). So, for the Independence Day parade, I removed the gel nails and sported a tank top representing the Vietnamese flag. I figured this was less subtle, less easily confused with US patriotism, and an opportunity to share some of what I loved about Vietnam.

Strangers seem to really like this tank top. On various occasions since arriving in the US, I’ve been asked if I’m repping Toy Story (pretty sure that was a red flag with yellow background, but I get the confusion!), a Marvel superhero, or an anime character. So far, no one has identified the Vietnamese flag.

It’s a confusing time to be celebrating my country, especially vis-á-vis its accomplishments in achieving lasting forms of democracy and protection of so-called ‘natural’ rights. I am reminded of Frederick Douglass’s famous line (1852): “I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.” If you haven’t yet watched Douglass’s descendants reciting this speech, it’s worth a listen!

The US experienced another important milestone last weekend. Taylor Swift married a guy named Travis. My adorable 4-year-old niece asked me, in earnest, if I was the Travis who married Taylor. Obviously, I played along and told her fun details about our wedding, answering her probing questions about the other guests.

I didn’t previously know a lot about this Travis, so I spent a bit of time investigating. I was not surprised to learn that he is also from Ohio (as I explained in my “call me TJ” post, Travis is probably the most Ohioan 1980s “boy” name I can think of). It was harder to identify his stance on LGBT rights. Apparently, he flipped off some of the anti-trans Budweiser boycotters back in 2023—so, he’s doing better than Travis Tritt in that regard—but I’m not sure we should be handing out any awards for that one action.

The thing about self-discovery missions—aka “free dives”—like the one I’ve been on is you ultimately must come home. You can shed the expectations of others that may have burdened you in the past, but reconnecting with your roots—family, commitments, work—is the prescribed ending. Even Ana Magdalena Bach ultimately comes face-to-face with her mother when she tries to reconcile her mid-life journey connecting her past with her future hopes.

Speaking of dreams, lest you think I’m going to leave this post without commenting on my Benito experience, let me reassure you it was absolutely soul stirring. I did not make it inside the Casita, but I got very close, and I cried when Benito gently embraced and whispered words of encouragement to his star-struck fans on the front patio of the Casita.

A few days after the concert, Benito visited me in a dream. He spoke to me in Spanish, but I understood all of it. He told me that everything will be OK, and that I can come back to his concert any time I want. Nos vemos, Benito. 🇵🇷❤️

Here’s my interpretation of the insignia. The globe at the center refers to the world of the Iceni tribe—i.e., the people Queen Boudica was charged with protecting. We can generalize this to simply signify home, or the people we love. The surrounding doodads are the invading Romans that Queen Boudica and her army fought against. These are metaphorical threats to safety of our home. OK, here’s the twist: until I photographed the pendant up close today, I hadn’t realized that the doodads are actually letters. They read: “truth against the…”; the implied ending is “the world.” Clearly, I need reading glasses or bifocals.

I have always told people that the design holistically represents a defense of social justice. This requires a fairly liberal interpretation of the imprint; you can judge for yourself after reading the rest of this post. The necklace comes from Pyrrha, a Vancouver-based jeweller, and every talisman they produce is unique. It was accompanied by a brief note from the artist, which is why I know it represents Queen Boudica in some regard!

Visiting London earlier this month afforded an opportunity for me to pay homage to Queen Boudica and to learn more about her story and its significance to the Welsh and English, can I just say British?, people. (Writing this line made me think of one of my favorite scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “who are the Britons?”) In case you’re not already familiar with QB, let me share a composite of some of the more common lore. Just broad brushstrokes here. In the first century AD, Celtic tribes—including the Iceni—were variously trying to fight off the Roman invasion and/or colluding with the Romans for political gain. At this point, the Romans occupied only parts of the south of Britain, but they were hungry for more. Around 60 AD, King Prasutagus, leader of the Iceni, died. In an attempt to secure peace for his people, Prasutagus bequeathed half of his kingdom to Rome and the other half to his two daughters. Roman leaders promptly disregarded these wishes and pillaged the Iceni kingdom. To further humiliate and threaten the Iceni, Romans publicly flogged Prasutagus’s widow, Queen Boudica. This brutal act increased Boudica’s prominence, as well as her resolve to rebel. Neighboring tribes allied with the Iceni and elected Boudica as their leader, as they fought back against the Romans.

Most of the rest of this is surely apocryphal, but it makes for a great story. By at least one account—a totally unreliable source given that he was on the side of the Romans, never met Boudica, and in fact, wrote about her 150 years after she died—QB was a formidable and fearsome warrior. One British history site translates this Roman historical text to read: “She was very tall, the glance of her eye most fierce; her voice harsh. A great mass of the reddest hair fell down to her hips. Her appearance was terrifying.” When she started her campaign, she amassed an army of 120,000; by the height of the conflict, there were almost 300,000 soldiers fighting behind her. Here, the numbers are important—even if specious—because they demonstrate how vastly outnumbered the Romans were in the war.

At first, QB and her army had some major wins. They burnt three cities to the ground, including London (then called Londinium—how cute is that?). Here there is actual evidence to substantiate the claim. Archeologists have identified a layer of red ash beneath London corresponding to the 60 AD timepoint. In one of her final and more famous battles, QB is said to have appeared in a chariot, with her two daughters alongside her, and delivered a passionate speech. “If you weigh well the strength of our armies, you will see that in this battle we must conquer or die. This is a woman’s resolve. As for the men, they may live or be slaves. I am not fighting for my kingdom and wealth now. I am fighting as an ordinary person for my lost freedom, my bruised body, and my outraged daughters.” Beyond badass, am I right?

If I stopped telling you the story at this point, we’d have a satisfying albeit facile piece of folklore. From the title of this post (not to mention the steadier history of the Roman Empire), I guess you know where this is heading. QB and the Iceni lost the war. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the Romans had more lethal weapons. Depending on which of the two dubious accounts you rely on, QB died either by poisoning herself (she would not allow herself to be captured by the Romans) or by some mystery illness resulting from the shock of the battle loss. Honestly, there are so many different fables here you could just make up your own ending.

We have no written records from the Iceni, and it is unclear the degree to which QB’s story lived on in oral Celtic traditions. But her story was taken up by Roman historians. And her legend was subsequently revived, repeatedly, in service of various British causes. During Queen Elisabeth 1’s reign, majestic comparisons were made between Queen Liz and QB—the former bravely standing up to the Spanish armada as the latter stood up to the Romans. Plays and poems were written to valorize QB. She came back into fashion during the time of Queen Victoria; Boudica’s name (surely not her actual/personal name when she was alive) also, and ironically, means victory.

The paradox goes on. In 1902, a statue was instated on the western end of the Westminster Bridge of London, honoring QB. It’s unclear why this statue, which was commissioned by Victoria and Albert in the 1850s and completed by its artist in the 1880s (just before his death), was not installed until 1902. Nonetheless, it ironically honored a leader who fought against the enormous Roman empire, at a time when Britain was itself the largest empire on earth, doing to countless colonies what Rome had done to the Iceni.

Meanwhile, the suffragette movement was starting to take form, demanding women’s right to vote. Boudica became an emblem for some of the activists in this movement. At this point, the outcomes of her first century battles become irrelevant. She was heroic and feminist resistance, and she represented a deeper truth, against the world. One historian writes of Boudica’s appeal: “She was a woman, mother and ruler, with her sex and maternity never impeding or negating her right to rule. As a role model she symbolised suffrage ideologies that challenged traditional definitions of femininity; facilitating articulation of woman’s embodiment of traditional masculine qualities and mediating between conventional constructs of womanhood and its redefinitions.”

Speaking of early 20th century women’s suffrage movements, I’m now in Ireland, and today I visited Kilmainham Gaol, a prison in Dublin that is famous for having held many political prisoners during numerous wars including the War of Independence and the Civil War (thank you, Lori, for the rec!).

At Kilmainham, I learned about a lot of political prisoners, but my favorite was Kathleen Lynn. Dr. Lynn was imprisoned for her role in the 1916 Easter Rising—for which she was the chief medical officer—but she was also a significant leader in the Irish women’s suffrage movement. She and many other activists working at the intersection of suffragism and Irish independence saw these two movements as necessarily intertwined. Dr. Lynn lived with Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, a labor activist, for more than 50 years. Among many other achievements, they organized a mass immunization program for poor children in Ireland. So badass. I’m obsessed with this power lesbian couple from the Irish revolution. I wish they had taken more photos.

Now, some honorable mentions from the rest of my tour of London. Seeing how I’m still an epidemiologist, I had to visit the John Snow’s water pump monument from the 1854 cholera outbreak (IYKYK). My college friend Steve and I drank beer next to the pump because beer is an important element of the John Snow story.

And, you may remember my comment about Hoa Hakananai’a, the Moái in the British Museum, from my post about Rapa Nui. So, I went to see him.

A few observations here: first, this Moái has incredibly fine features compared to the Moái we saw in Rapa Nui, which reminds me how climate controlled indoor museums protect against the wear and tear of nature. Also, there was a placard next to Hoa Hakananai’a that acknowledged the “complex colonial history” of Rapa Nui and the Rapa Nui people’s desire to bring Hoa Hakananai’a home (how civil of the Brits); however, I noticed that the placard did not include a translation of Hoa Hakananai’a: stolen friend.

Boudica lost to the Romans but nonetheless won the longer narrative war regarding her place in history. Dr. Lynn was imprisoned but ultimately celebrated as one of the “radical queer women at the very heart of the Irish Revolution”. Hoa Hakananai’a remains separated from his friends by >13,000km but is venerated by Rapa Nui people today, despite the odds. Let’s celebrate more losers.

The Apopo Foundation has been working with the Cambodian Mine Action Center for the past eight years employing African giant pouched rats to detect unexploded bombs and landmines in Cambodia. At the Apopo Centre, we learned about the historical conflicts that resulted in the 6 million landmines still present in rural parts of Cambodia. Since 1979, more than 20,000 people have died due to accidental landmine encounters in Cambodia, many of them children. We also learned how and why they train the rats, which they call HeroRats.

The African giant pouched rat is native to East Africa. In fact, the HeroRats working in Cambodia are brought from Zimbabwe, where they will have completed a 9-month training program. They have poor eyesight but a fantastic sense of smell. And they are more economical than both dogs and humans. While it takes about $25k to train a dog for bomb or landmine detection, it costs only $7.3k to train a HeroRat. Plus, they can clear a path of land the size of a tennis field in 30 minutes; it would take a human days to do the same work with a metal detector—in part because metal detectors produce a lot of false positives, picking up metallic objects that are not landmines. When the rat finds a suspected landmine, it stops and starts scratching the ground. The human handlers then mark the spot for verification by metal detector. I got first-hand experience with those rat claws because at one point of the tour, we were allowed to hold one of the rats that likes humans; they were pretty scratchy!

^{^ TJ and a new rat friend, who sadly was not qualified for landmine detection but great at entertaining tourists}

At the Apopo Centre, they have a monument to a HeroRat named Ronin, who holds the record for landmine detections, having found over 100 before he passed away earlier this year. I should say that the rat I held was no Ronin. Our guide explained that the rats at the Apopo Centre are there for demonstration purposes only; sadly, they did not perform well enough on the final exam to be deployed for actual field work.

At one point in the tour, we saw a map showing the geospatial distribution of landmines in Cambodia. I was struck by the concentration along the border with Thailand.

When I asked our guide what explains the pattern, he briefly mentioned two historical factors, both surrounding the Cambodian genocide (1975-79): 1) the US bombing of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War (early 70s), and 2) the ousting of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnamese forces (1979-early 80s). I knew little about either of these campaigns before visiting Southeast Asia, but I spent quite a bit of time learning about each over the past few weeks of travel in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Here’s what I learned.

The American War

In Vietnam, the Vietnam War is called the American War, or sometimes a variation on that, e.g., “Resistance War against the American Imperialists.” I visited two war museums in Vietnam: the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi, and the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly called Saigon). I learned that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong used supply routes along the Cambodian border to move troops and supplies into South Vietnam. In response, the US attacked these same regions with over 26 million explosive sub munitions and bombs weighing over 500,000 tons (that’s more than the sum total of all bombs dropped by the allies during WW2). A substantial proportion of these bombs did not detonate upon impact, leaving countless deadly traps that continue to kill farmers, children, and other civilians decades after this war. Thus, Cambodia and its people were directly and severely impacted by the war, despite an official stance of neutrality.

I have more to say about the effects of the US/Vietnam War on Cambodia, but first, let me offer a brief tangent about some of my other observations at the war museums in Vietnam. I have previously written about how I feel that my US education left me with a fairly lopsided and unsophisticated understanding of the motives and effects of my country’s historical military interventions. At the Vietnamese museums, I recognized the names of events during the war—Gulf of Tonkin, Tet Offensive, etc.—but I repeatedly felt that the nature of these events, especially with regard to the horrific suffering of victims, had been sanitized and simplified when taught in my early education. I was, of course, aware that the Vietnamese museums are propagandist in their own right. But I kept wondering about the difference between building museums that detail atrocities committed during war on home soil in recent past (the time of my parents’ lives) and museums in my home country, which document wars that happened elsewhere (the US hasn’t experienced war on home soil for 160+ years) or in the more distant past.

One potent example was the extensive exhibit on agent orange at the War Remnants Museum in Saigon. The US dropped 80 million liters of toxic chemicals between 1961 and 1971, 61% of which was agent orange, in order to destroy dense tropical rainforest where Viet Cong were able to hide. Agent orange contains dioxin, which is not only a primary carcinogen but also genotoxic, meaning its effects can be passed down up to children across 4 generations. Thus, as with the unexploded bombs, agent orange continues to contribute to the suffering of children in Southeast Asia today. Much of the exhibit included stories and pictures of those living with birth defects, neurological conditions, reproductive complications, and many other severe health consequences of agent orange exposure. The exhibit included touching stories of agent orange sufferers from the US (in addition to the 3 million victims in Vietnam, many US and Korean soldiers were exposed to these toxins) coming together with Vietnamese victims to provide support to one another and raise awareness.

Survival in the killing fields

As the US/Vietnam War was coming to an end, Cambodia became further entangled through a series of political events, some of which are suspected to be related to CIA operations in Pnom Penh at the time. While I was in Cambodia, I read Haing Ngor’s heartbreaking and incredibly detailed memoir, Survival in the Killing Fields. The killing fields refer to execution and mass grave sites where the brutal communist regime of the Khmer Rouge committed the genocide of 1-2 million Cambodians (nearly a quarter of the population), during 1975-79. He writes:

The destruction of Cambodia could have been avoided. What led to it was politics. By politics I do not just mean the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge dealt the worst blow to Cambodia, but they did not destroy it by themselves. Outside countries lent a hand, most of them without realizing the effects their policies would have. It is a complicated story, going back many years. To begin with, France, our former colonial ruler, didn’t prepare us for independence. It didn’t give us the strong, educated middle class we needed to govern ourselves well. Then there was the United States, whose support pushed Cambodia off its neutral path to the right in 1970 and began the political unbalanced process. Once Lon Nol [a right-wing, US-allied leader] was in power, the United States could have forced him to cut down on corruption, and it could have stopped its own bombing, but it didn’t, until too late. The bombing and the corruption helped push Cambodia the other way, toward the left. On the communist side, China gave the Khmer Rouge weapons and an ideology. The Chinese could have stopped the Khmer Rhouge from slaughtering civilians, but they didn’t try…

Before the Khmer Rouge took power, Ngor was an obstetrician in Pnom Penh. He and his family were expelled from the city and sent to rural labor camps, perceived to be enemies of the new regime, in part due to his professional status (physicians, engineers, professors, etc. were among the first to be executed) but also due to his family’s ethnicity, mixed Khmer and Chinese. Most of his family died over the subsequent four years. Ngor himself was imprisoned and tortured three times for being suspected to be a physician; he never met another person who survived three imprisonments. His wife died due to pregnancy-related complications when she was 7-months pregnant. Tragically, Ngor had the skills to save his wife (and the baby) but using those skills would have outed him to the Khmer Rouge, leading them all to be executed.

After Ngor survived, he landed in Los Angeles, where he worked with other refugees to help them resettle. In a highly improbable turn of events, he was discovered by a casting agent and cast in the 1983 film The Killing Fields without any prior acting experience. He won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his work in that film (the first Asian American to win an Oscar!) and went on to star in numerous other films and TV shows. In 1996, he was murdered in LA. Most suspect this was a political assassination; he had become a vocal advocate for the criminal human rights prosecution of Khmer Rouge leaders.

Around the time I arrived in Thailand, I read the section of Ngor’s memoir where he crossed the Thai border by foot with several other refugees, trying to escape the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. He writes:

The mines appeared on either side of the path, sometimes in the middle. They had coin-size detonator buttons, white or rusted in colour. From the detonator buttons, trip lines made of nearly invisible white nylon thread led to tying-off points such as trees or rocks nearby. We crept forward, around curves, up and down, and then we heard another explosion ahead. When we came down the side of the hill to a river we saw the burials already under way… Whether the Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge planed the mines didn’t matter much to us. All we knew was that we had to keep our eyes on the trail, searching for white threads. Dry leaves fell across the trail and drifted in the wake of footsteps, making spotting them more difficult.

In 1979, Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia and pushed the Khmer Rouge forces to the western border with Thailand—to which various refugees, including Khmer Rouge soldiers had attempted to retreat. The border became a front line during the subsequent war between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese-backed forces. This region, known as the K5 mine belt became one of the world’s most heavily mined stretches of land.

My impression (Haing Ngor’s as well) is that the Cambodian people were some of the gentlest people I’ve ever met. It was so hard to reconcile this with what I learned about the genocide. Ngor’s book helps these senseless horrors make a bit more sense—both by detailing the external influences, of the US, of the Soviets and Chinese, and of the Vietnamese, but also by trying to explain the motives of his torturers, some of whom sought revenge for past ills of the country, some who were misled and convinced that their defense against the US capitalists and imperialists required extreme measures. I’m grateful to Ngor for sharing his story, and I’m grateful to the HeroRats for doing life-saving work to redress a brutal legacy of human violence.

I visited Julia earlier this month. She is working at VinU, which is Vietnam’s first private (non-profit) university. I gave a seminar talk (about conversion therapy, of course) and guest lectured for a psychology course while visiting VinU. Before my guest lecture, Julia had mentioned to me how seriously Vietnamese people take education. Despite the warning, I was stunned by my classroom experience. When I teach at home, I am accustomed to students scrolling social media on their phones, chatting with their friends, or simply getting up and leaving in the middle of a lecture. In Hanoi, students closed their laptops and phones, took hand-written notes, and repeatedly raised their hands to pose questions mid-lecture (this is good!—it’s a sign the students are engaged). I was blown away.

I shared these reflections with a colleague and conjectured: in Vietnam, I think education is sacred. She corrected me: I think you mean sacrosanct. Sacred is religious. Sacrosanct goes beyond religion to suggest that something is respected even if not in a religious context. Indeed, most Vietnamese identify as atheist. And yet they treat education with near-holy appreciation.

One of my favorite sites in Vietnam (Julia’s too, she told me!) was the Temple of Literature in Hanoi. The frequency with which Vietnamese students (including adorable, robed kindergarten students walking in graduation ceremonies) visit this temple is a testament to how seriously they take their studies.

The Temple of Literature was built in the 11th century and served as Vietnam’s first national university. The temple is primarily dedicated to Confucius, but it includes monuments honoring other important teachers. My favorite was Chu Văn An, who was basically Vietnam’s patron saint of education and an all-round badass in several respects. First, he is famous for having submitted the Thất trảm sớ, or “The Petition to Behead Seven Mandarins.” Mandarins were professors in Vietnam’s feudal era. Chu Văn An saw corruption among Mandarins who were trying to curry favor with the emperor. When the king refused the petition, Chu Văn An resigned and withdrew from his academic work. He espoused an approach to education that was inherently egalitarian, if not equitable. He believed that education should be accessible to all and worked tirelessly to make it so. For these reasons and more, Chu Văn An is a hero even among contemporary cohorts of Vietnamese students. Seven hundred years after his death, he is still celebrated in a way that can inspire those of us in this profession (at least, it does for me) to be better teachers. When the Vietnamese celebrate Teacher’s Day each November, images and stories of Chu Văn An are used to remind people that education is not just about credentials or job preparation but also about a moral tradition that Chu Văn An embodied.

At the Temple of Literature, I saw young students praying for success on upcoming exams—typically the national high school graduation exams. My guide explained to me that the vast majority (74% is the statistic I found later) of Vietnamese high school students complete these exams—a prerequisite for going to university or college—but only half of those applicants are admitted. This scarcity of opportunity is one key difference between the drive for higher education in Vietnam, as compared to Canada (and the US, for that matter). In Canada, students of course compete for spots across universities with varying acceptance rates (a given university may admit only 30-60% of applicants, for example), but ultimately, almost every student who seeks postsecondary education is given access. This explains why Canada has among the highest university degree rates globally—Statistics Canada reports that in 2021-22, half of 18-24 year olds were undertaking some degree.

While my guide was explaining all this, I approached a row of turtle sculptures—turtles representing longevity, learning, and wisdom in Vietnamese culture. Collectively, the stone tablets above these turtles record the names and birthplaces of over 1,000 graduates who passed royal exams held at the temple in centuries past.

Walking around the temple, I saw the reverence on the faces of Vietnamese school children, and I felt the weight of Vietnam’s first national university, now one of the most visited sites in Hanoi, by locals and foreign tourists alike. I thought about increasing scrutiny of the “value” of postsecondary education back home in North America (in Canada, too!). Statistics showing that folks in the US see college degrees as having less importance today than in decades past. Politicians like Vance calling for “aggressive attacks” on universities in response to “wokeism” and leftist politics run amock—an observation notably not shared by university students themselves, irrespective of political affiliation. Even more troubling than politicized attitudes toward academia is the systemic underfunding of universities; in Canada, public spending on postsecondary institutions per GDP has decreased by about a third over the past 16 years.

As we were leaving the Temple of Literature, we came across a 300-year-old banyan tree that has been allowed to grow into and around the 1,000-year-old temple walls. My guide explained that this was not by chance; as with the turtles, banyans represent longevity, vitality, durability.

Speaking of old trees, the same week I visited the Temple of Literature, Trump visited China. President Chi took Trump to Zhongnanhai, an ancient compound that is politically important, protected, and therefore far-less visited than the Temple of Literature. A US-based Asian studies scholar interprets this moment in the gardens of Zhongnanhai: “... a hot mic captured Xi drawing Trump’s attention to the age of the trees around them—some centuries old, some said to be more than a thousand years old. When Trump asked whether Xi had taken other presidents on similar walks, Xi replied that he had only rarely… the Zhongnanhai walk reveal[s] a recurring logic in Chinese-American diplomacy: America’s fast-moving economy is invited to look at China’s sense of tradition.”

Later this month, I explored the ancient temples near Siem Reap, Cambodia, with my friend Keval, who is also a professor. Before this visit, I hadn’t appreciated that there are actually thousands of temples in the region, most constructed between the 9th and 15th centuries CE. While Angkor Wat is the most famous, Keval and I loved Preah Khan, which means “holy sword” in the Khmer language. It was a highly important and well populated Buddhist university; when it was established in the 12th century, there were almost 100,000 teachers, attendants, and dancers working within it.

At Preah Khan, I also came across banyan trees with roots allowed to grow around the ancient walls—similar to what we saw at Ta Prohm, aka the “tomb raider temple”, so-called because parts of the movie Tomb Raider (as well as Indiana Jones) were filmed there. Ta Prohm is way more popular, and it is certainly beautiful. But as an academic and a nerd, I far preferred Preah Khan. Also, while both temples have been preserved in a way that allows nature to take over the ancient ruins, Preah Khan has maintained more structure and detail from its original construction. I liked the mixture of old and new, human-made and natural, academic and holy.

At this point, I thought there has to be something going on with ancient trees in these temples. Our guide confirmed: in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions (the religion of the Khmer empire changed in the 12th and 13th centuries), certain trees serve as sacred conduits between the underworld, the earth, and the heavens. In older indigenous and animistic religions—which are still observed alongside Buddhism in Cambodia today—some trees themselves can be spirits. For Khmer people, banyans are neak ta, or spiritual entities. Of course, the banyan immediately reminded me of the ceiba, or grandmother tree I encountered in Peru. When I got back to my computer to research the parallel, I learned that ceibas and banyans are both very large tropical trees with massive canopies and buttress roots. Banyans start their lives as epiphytes, or plants growing on trees, while ceibas frequently host suspended epiphytes. Both are critical to their respective ecosystems in dominant ways—what biologists call keystone species—and both are locally regarded as sacred. And, thus, both are teachers: they create the conditions for organisms around them to connect to roots, move between worlds, and thrive.

I was grateful to explore and learn about Korean culture through Tom’s lens, as a gyopo, someone of Korean ancestry who lives outside the country. Korean society is quite hierarchical, with rigid social expectations about how one lives one’s life. One example: I love how this influencer explains what goes into Korean greetings, including year of birth and attendant age-based forms of respectful language. I knew this abstractly before coming, but it was fascinating to close-hand observe a slice of this during my time in South Korea. (P.S. Fun fact: in Korea, your ‘Korean age’ will be 1-2 years older than your ‘international age’ because age-counting starts at 1 when you are born, but also because there are also some rounding tricks to do with year of birth versus month of birth that still confuse me.)

Seoul is intense and chaotic with over 10 million residents. I loved it as a visitor but can understand how it must cause exhaustion for those who live there. One weekend, Tom and I went to Busan—a city of “only” 3 million—and I immediately felt the change in energy. Busan was relaxed in a way I didn’t know a city of its size could feel relaxed.

In the midst of the hustle and bustle of Seoul, I found an oasis of calm in the jjimjilbang. Jjimjibang translates to a heated room or “treatment that makes you sweat”, depending on whom you consult. Calling it a spa doesn’t quite cut it. In North America, spas are bougie and pricey, but the jjimjilbang is accessible to everyone ($10 on average, affordable to most South Koreans), and it arguably flattens class structure. There are two parts to the jjimjilbang: a sex/gender-segregated part in which you are naked, and an all-gender space in which you are clothed but in a gender-neutral uniform given to you by the jjimjilbang. In both spaces, any markers of class or status are removed by design. Of course, I spent a lot of time wondering about the experiences of trans people in these spaces. On the one hand, the jjimjilbang is a space for everyone (I would have been surprised to see ‘sex’-policing in this space); on the other, the ‘sex/gender’ segregation tells you something about expectations of how people show up in their bodies and identities.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the jjimjilbang engenders communal relaxation that doesn’t exist elsewhere. Tom and I went to the largest jjimjilbang in South Korea, in Busan, and I was endlessly curious. It was a Sunday, so there were many families with small children. It was a third space, or liminal space, that is missing from so many other contexts—including and maybe most notably North America. In addition to the sauna parts of the jjimjilbang, you can relax in very high-tech massage chairs. At the Busan jjimjilbang there was an instant noodle bar, a salon, an arcade room, on and on. It’s kind of like spa meets amusement park.

There are two other spaces I experienced in Korea that deserve honorable mention for feeling surprisingly calm.

The first is the subway! There is a steep learning curve to the Korean subway system, but once you’ve figured it out (within a day or two), it becomes apparent that this is one of the best designed public transit systems anywhere.

A few notes on how the Korean subway achieves the ultimate human-centered design experience. Exits are numbered, labeled, and included in the apps (NAVER, which is the preferred app for navigating within South Korea, but even Google Maps, which will give you at least a part of the transit picture). This means you don’t waste time guessing which street corner you’ll arrive at when you exit the subway. There is no talking (or only quiet talking) allowed on the Seoul subway. At first, this is eerie. But with time, it is calming and thoroughly pleasant. Our public transit systems in North America are shit, and part of this is attributable to a lack of social norms for being polite and quiet while publicly transiting (IMHO). There are bathrooms in every station (so basic, right?), and the bathrooms are remarkably clean.

The second space that I found to be profoundly calming was the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), a modern structure designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. Hadid has been described as the “queen of curves”—apparent in my pic below—and was the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize for architecture.

I learned that this structure was built with over 40,000 aluminum panels—each one uniquely shaped to fit the overall structure design. In fact, Hadid was unable to contract panel production outside Korea, so a South Korean company called Steellife created them for the structure, which can withstand an earthquake of 6.0 magnitude. There is no discernible entrance to the DDP. You’d think that would be unnerving, but it was strangely relaxing.

The DDP, Korean subways, and jjimjilbang have something in common. They bring people together in ways that resist social (or at least, socioeconomic) stratification. I’m grateful to have experienced them, and I think we need more liminal/third spaces that do this. Kamsamnee daa to the Koreans who taught me during my visit, and thank you to one fabulous gyopo.

Last year, my team published the last output from a systematic review on the scope and nature of so-called “conversion therapy”, globally. We started the review in 2019, when I learned that the Canadian government was contemplating a federal ban on these practices. My thinking was that, if we can understand what does and does not constitute ‘conversion therapy’ across jurisdictions, we’ll be better prepared to identify it within Canada. In case you aren’t familiar with conversion therapy, it is a wide-ranging set of practices—including programs, treatments, talk therapy, support groups, and many other organized activities—with the unifying goal of suppressing or denying LGBTQ identities, behaviors, or expressions.

Saying that this systematic review was difficult is an extraordinary understatement. The first problem is that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes conversion practices (that’s why we wanted to undertake the review to begin with!). On top of this, we were underfunded and under intense pressure to produce results to inform the evolving Canadian legislation. We resisted this pressure and took our time with the review because we had to; the stakes were high. The review triggered a lawsuit by a practitioner who opposed the inclusion of one of our search terms in the review protocol. The case is still making its way through the courts. All to say, I’m proud of what we accomplished, and this was some of the most difficult work I’ve ever done.

We learned a lot from this review, but here are two of the more important findings. First, we looked at 16 articles that estimated the prevalence of conversion practices among LGBTQ people. We found that approximately (median) 8.5% had experienced conversion practices at some point in their lives; this was reported by NBC News at the time. More importantly, we identified moderation of this prevalence by geographic context. For example, the median prevalence estimate from the US was 13%, while the median from Canada was 7%. This is consistent with what we know about advertising for conversion therapy, which is common in the US but relatively rare in Canada.

In the second part of the review, we took a more qualitative approach, reviewing 41 studies conducted in 14 different countries, to try to derive a ‘typology’ of conversion practice settings, perpetrators, and methods. From this analysis, we learned that the boundaries of conversion practices are absurdly fuzzy. For example, we identified 10 different types of method or modality. The most common were gender role enforcement (66% of studies), prayer (59%), group-based practices (53%), individual secular counseling (41%), removing demons (41%), religious/pastoral counseling (38%), sexual abstinence (38%), encouragement of heterosexual relationships (38%), and aversion therapies (34%).

One of my motivations to travel for this sabbatical was to meet with and learn from those studying and working to prevent conversion practices in cross-national contexts. Most notably, I visited John Fenaughty in Auckland, New Zealand, where we started working on a project to do a deeper dive on the nature of conversion practices in Canada and NZ—given noteworthy similarities in social contexts, as described in my earlier blog. I also met with folks working on conversion therapy in Colombia and Australia—more on that later. I want to share three broad brushstroke observations from my travels so far.

1. ‘Conversion therapy’ is the wrong term.

I knew we had a labeling problem long before my sabbatical; I wrote about this for the Globe & Mail during the Canadian debates over pending legislation. But my appreciation for how problematic the nomenclature is deepened as I discussed it with colleagues in other countries.

My colleague David Kinitz published a paper from our qualitative study with 22 Canadian conversion therapy survivors in 2020 to introduce the concept of the ‘conversion therapy pyramid’.

We maintain that so-called ‘conversion therapy’ is only the tip of the iceberg (sorry for mixed metaphors). While 8.5% of queer and trans people globally have experienced these more circumscribed practices, countless more have experienced less well delineated efforts that share the same goal: to deny the validity of LGBTQ identities. These include things like a parent, teacher, coach, or religious leader telling you that your identity is not real, that you’re mistaken, that you should try harder to be straight or cisgender, that god doesn’t want you to be that way, that your life will be happier without this identity, that your grandmother will be very disappointed… you get the idea. And, of course, conversion therapy and the more ubiquitous sexual orientation and gender identity and expression change efforts (SOGIECE) are both held up by cisheterosexism—the societal belief that some gender identities (i.e., cisgender ones) and sexual orientations (i.e., heterosexual ones) are preferred to others.

I’ve recently been introduced to two unifying concepts that help to both unify and differentiate the components of the pyramid. Identity invalidation refers to refusal or dismissal of someone’s identity as not being “real” or “true”. SOGIECE and conversion practices constitute forms of identity invalidation. And conversion ‘ideology’ refers to an underlying belief that god or some other power or system rejects LGBTQ experiences and expressions. I like framing this as an ideology because it reminds us that the starting point is a dogma. As a scientist and a teacher I dislike dogma, but even if you’re not into the scientific method, you may have good reason to dislike dogma because it discourages curiosity and critical thinking.

2. Some jurisdictions have taken preventive approaches that go beyond the Canadian legislation.

Colombian lawmakers were debating a national conversion therapy ban while I was visiting in October. In our review, we included a study that found that a quarter of those surveyed in Colombia had experienced conversion therapy—the highest prevalence of any country included in our review. Although the law did not pass, it brought increased attention to these practices to people across the country. One result is that conversion therapy survivors have become better connected to one another. The same thing happened in Canada during our legislative process. Nada Que Curar (“Nothing to Cure”) is a thriving organization connecting Colombians with a history of being exposed to conversion therapy. If you speak Spanish, I highly recommend their documentary.

Victoria State, Australia, arguably has the most comprehensive conversion therapy ban passed to date. I met with Timothy Jones who helped explain how their state’s legislation created a particularly effective response. As with the Canadian law (and many US state laws), the Victorian ban criminalizes conversion practices. Unlike the Canadian law, the Victorian ban was paired with upstream preventive activities to help would-be perpetrators of conversion therapy adjust their practices to conform with the law. I am inspired by this model, and I hope we can work toward a similar approach in Canada.

3. Peer-reviewed scientific evidence about conversion therapy and its associated health consequences is dramatically increasing.

While on sabbatical, I’ve been asked to review at least one conversion therapy-related manuscript a week. Empirical, bona fide scientific evidence about these practices is increasing in step with international attention to them.

[number of PubMed citations with keyword “conversion therapy” by year]

Last October, SCOTUS heard oral arguments in Chiles vs. Salazar. I won’t bore you with all of my thoughts on this case, but the aspect of the oral arguments that most interested me was the defendant’s lawyer’s argument that non-consensual conversion therapy should be less harmful than consensual conversion therapy. Chiles is “a practicing Christian… who believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God’s design, including their biological sex.” I have always thought that those who engage with conversion practices consensually will experience a greater cumulative harm (epidemiologically speaking, a greater dose). By definition, they have invested in conversion ideology, and unfortunately, they will suffer more as a consequence. Chiles’s argument was basically: if they don’t want to be LGBTQ, why shouldn’t we help them live according to the life that god had planned for them.

This kind of thinking is dangerous. In our qualitative and quantitative studies in the context of the Canadian ban, we emphasized how harmful these beliefs are.

Last month, SCOTUS ruled on this case. In an 8-1 decision, the court ruled that a Colorado state ban on ‘conversion therapy’ was unconstitutional. If you’re remotely interested in US politics or the bizarre trajectory of the Supreme Court of the US, I highly recommend Adam Feldman’s substack.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s lone dissent is poignant: “I begin my analysis with a simple observation: Our First Amendment jurisprudence does not treat speech as existing in a vacuum. Instead, how the First Amendment applies to a State’s power to regulate speech depends upon the context in which the regulation of speech occurs.”

Her analysis continues:

In the context of medical practice, we insist upon competence, not debate. The degree to which medical providers speaking within the boundaries of providing patient care can express themselves is limited because their interactions with patients are constrained by their well-established duties and the requirement that they meet the standard of care… Like it or not, treatment standards exist in America. And those standards necessarily reflect the expert medical community’s current beliefs about the safety and efficacy of various medical treatments, whatever those beliefs might be.

If the State exists to protect or provide for us (why else are we voting & tax-paying?), then surely it also exists to regulate “therapies.”

I look forward to your feedback.

The DtMF track that has weighed on me the most is Turista. Bad Bunny has explained that he wrote this song after sitting in his car at Ocean Park, PR, feeling sad, crying, and then noticing a stark contrast in his surrounds: tourists were dancing, playing volleyball, and taking selfies on the beach across from him, while Puerto Ricans were living a very different reality. Here is a translation of the lyrics (I tried to translate these myself; hispanohablantes: por favor, corrígeme si hay errores):

En mi vida fuiste turista

Tú solo viste lo mejor de mí

Y no lo que yo sufría

Te fuiste sin saber el porqué

El porqué de mis herida’

Y no te tocaba a ti curarla’

Viniste a pasarla bien

Y la pasamos bien

Una foto bonita

Un atardecer hermoso

Una bailaíta

Tu cadenita de oro

Estuvimos tan cerquita

Mirándono a los ojo’

Dime si vistes la pena

De mi corazón roto

Que lleva así, lleva así mucho tiempo

Ya lleva así, lleva así muchos año’

Escondiéndome los sentimiento’

Tengo miedo que me hagan más daño

Ya no sé, mi amor

Lo que la vida tendrá

Pa ti y pa mí

Si se da, pues se da

Y si no, pues también

Vamos a disfrutar que

La noche se puso bonita

Pero no tanto como tú

Jamás y nunca como tú

On its surface, the song is about the extractive nature of global tourism, and the ‘open veins’ of Latin America. In Benito’s words: “These people are here watching this incredible sunset, they’re taking beautiful fucking photos, they’re having the best time. They’re gonna leave and they enjoyed the best of Puerto Rico, but they didn’t actually live through what Puerto Ricans go through every day, the negative parts of the country, the situations Puerto Ricans live day by day.” This interpretation of the song is unnervingly portrayed in the Turista music video, in which Bad Bunny plays an AirBnB cleaner tidying the extraordinary mess left by a tourist couple. My favorite part of the video is right after he first arrives. He smiles, then puts his hands on hips, surveying the carnage left by these gringo tourists. Since watching this video, I feel an enormous appreciation for AirBnB cleaners and always try to leave behind a cash tip, even if it is smaller than I’d wish to do.

I understand that it is not truly possible to live through what residents of the countries I’ve visited experience on a day-to-day basis. How could I truly absorb the history of internal violence in Colombia, comprehend the atrocities of the Argentinian dictatorship, or honor the cultural significance of the Moai, when I’ve spent mere weeks in these places? And yet, I take from this song an admonition. A call to be a better tourist.

For me, the song has deeper meanings. Traveling has afforded me the opportunity to make beautiful connections with people I wouldn’t typically meet at home. These relationships feel too brief, and at times curiously devoid of deeper emotions—fears, sadnesses—that are too easily bracketed when one is traveling to new and thrilling locales every week. As Bad Bunny sings, “escondiéndome los sentimientos.”

I’ve been trying to work out a few practices that can help me (and you?) be a better guest in the places I visit. I’m not referring to the AirBnB mess in the music video; I’m steadfast in my commitment to leaving places in near-pristine conditions. What I mean is that I strive for a tourism that is more conscientious—if such a thing is even possible in the extremely unjust global maldistribution of wealth.

Earlier this month I reunited with Fayyaz in Bali and talked about this in more detail. Here’s what I took from our exchange. First, try to get to know locals, as best as you can. I reflected on my 26 year history of international travel as a US citizen, and I have to admit that we often spend more time when traveling talking about ourselves than listening to locals (I include myself in this tendency). When guides and tourism industry workers know you’re genuinely interested in their lives and realities, they can tell, and what they share can be profoundly moving.

Second, speak the local language, even if you struggle to do so. Now that I’m traveling in Asia (and no longer in Latin America 😢), this has been a challenge for me, but I know how important it is, and I keep trying and listening, even if I get it wrong. I’m currently in Korea, and locals are remarkably patient when I try to eke out the four or five Korean phrases I’ve learned.

Finally, I hope for a better framework—yes, including the apps and shortcuts—for ethical tourism. I have managed to find these for eco-tourism, which is fantastic, but I have not yet found them for ethical treatment of humans. If anyone knows of any, please let me know!

Thanks for reading about my journey.

In North America (Turtle Island), it has become customary to acknowledge the land you’re on when you start a meeting or gathering. For example, I grew up on the lands of the Maumee and Shawnee peoples, who were violently displaced by my ancestors. And I currently live—when not on sabbatical—on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, also known as Vancouver. I’ve always felt uneasy about land acknowledgments, and yet, I am confident that they are the bare minimum we should be doing in service of reconciliation. Critiques of land acknowledgments are plentiful, and well justified. If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend the clever satire of land acknowledgments offered by the Canadian sketch comedy show Baroness Von Sketch.

Earlier this month I gave a talk about my research on conversion therapy at the University of Otago. I had noticed that other academic presenters in Aotearoa started their talks by positioning themselves in relation to their ancestry, rather than offering a land acknowledgment. I confirmed with my host that this was appropriate for me to do and then prepared a slide with photos of my maternal (née Schell) and paternal (née Merkle) grandmothers—both of German ancestry with several generations on Maumee and Shawnee lands. (My ancestry also includes folks from England, and a few other parts of Europe, but I need to do a better job organizing and reviewing those records before I make too many claims.) Germans started settling in western Ohio in the early to mid-19th century, around the time when Indigenous Peoples were “removed” from the lands. I was reflecting to my kiwi colleague that the term ‘settle’ euphemizes the true history. When I rehearsed this opening with her, she said, “great job, but don’t try to speak te reo.” 🫣 This Māori tradition is called the pepeha, and the protocols differ for Māori and tauiwi (non-Māori). The principle here is that building connection—the purpose of the pepeha—prerequires context. If I know where you are coming from, I can better understand how we relate to one another. Our ancestors precede us.

Both land acknowledgments and the pepeha serve to ground us in place, and in history. I previously wrote about how reading Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America further opened my eyes to the collective ignorance, even wilful dismissal, of the violent and unjust colonial and imperialist histories of the US, among those of us who grew up in the US (it’s become abundantly clear to me that the rest of the world is well aware of what played out during the founding of the US). Being in Aotearoa has afforded an opportunity to reflect on what we’re missing—certainly in the US, but also in Canada—when it comes to land rights.

Bear with me for a few tangents before I say more about what I learned from Aotearoa. After I finished reading Open Veins of Latin America, I picked up America, América by Greg Grandin, on the recommendation of Leslie Smith (another rec!; his insta feed is full of brilliant “if you read this…” posts, recommending historical and contemporary leftist non-fiction). It was a perfect complement because Grandin argues that US and Latin American histories are inextricably connected, though far too often we learn about and contemplate them in hemispherical isolation. Grandin further argues that US identity and politics have been shaped through the country’s engagements with Latin America—just as much as Latin America has been shaped by the US’s incursions and economic manipulations.

While reading America, América, I started to think about the moral distress some European settlers must have felt upon arriving to the American continents in the early years post-contact. By invoking moral distress, I don’t mean to diminish the true genocidal crimes of settler-colonialism; I just mean to say that I had never previously considered that colonial leaders would have needed a strategy to manage those settlers who felt unnerved once they realized they had been sold a giant lie, i.e., that the lands they were settling on were empty. In an attempt to justify the racist and forcible removal, death, and enslavement of Indigenous Peoples, the Catholic pope proclaimed the “doctrine of discovery,” the far-fetched claim that if a territory didn’t already have Christians living on it, the first Christians to arrive could claim it as their own. This is closely connected to the contemporaneous concept of “terra nullius” (nobody’s thing) and “vacuum domicilium” (empty place), both of which were invoked by popes and colonizer leaders to attempt to legitimize the enormously greedy land grab that happened across the Americas (north and south) during the 15th to 19th centuries. Over time, these stolen lands were converted from collective holdings—consistent with Indigenous practices—to ‘homesteads,’ another euphemized term for colonization, this time referring to collective lands that are subsequently partitioned into privately and individually settled lots.

The more I travel, the more absurd the idea of private land ownership seems to me. Yes, I’ve subscribed to it, purchasing my own condo a few years ago. And yet, I feel unsettled (ha) with this concept, and economic privilege—on local and global scales. I recently read Simon Winchester’s Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. In it, he reflects, “Even though my property was neither particularly costly nor likely ever to be valuable, nor in truth was even very useful, my ownership of it had a powerful personal symbolism.” This resonates. Somehow I was conditioned to believe that home ownership was a requisite step of adulthood.

I was curious to learn from Winchester’s book the history of private land ownership in the English (meaning England the place) context. This is an unjustly brief summary, but effectively: common land rights became entrenched for ‘landlords’ during the feudal period. These common rights were made legal through a process called enclosure, which refers to the appropriation of common land and assignment to one or more private individuals. It was formally in motion by 1604, when the Parliament first legislated the practice, effectively codifying the interests of the landlords. Enclosure peaked in the late 1700s, by which time the vast majority of English land had been converted to private parcels. Capitalists will argue that enclosure led to efficiency and improvements in farming and production; Marxists will argue that this was the first major acceleration of dispossession of the poorest and most marginalized people in society. I share this history to make the point that the notion of private individual land parcel ownership is not so old, even for the British, is certainly not predestined, and only has meaning in the context of time, place, and people.

Ok, back to Aotearoa. The first week I arrived in New Zealand, I read the following headline and news story, in the Waiheke newspaper:

Ngāti Pāoa are a Māori iwi (tribe) with historical connections to Waiheke island. Reading the article prompted me to ask my colleague and his husband lots of questions about the land settlement process in Aotearoa. Notwithstanding some recent unsuccessful attempts of right-wing leaders to reinterpret historic treaties and impose new limits of Māori land rights, the vast majority of kiwis and their elected politicians remain committed to continuing to return public lands to their rightful iwi owners.

This struck me as a stark contrast from where we are in Canada. For one, there is an anti-reconciliation ideology that seems to be preoccupying some conservative Canadian politicians. As just one example, a BC MP recently asserted that the federal government should stop making land acknowledgments if it supports the rights of private land ownership. The chiefs of the Tla’amin, Homalco, K’omoks, and Klahoose nations responded by saying: “chillax, bud.” 🙂 Even in New Zealand, where hundreds of settlements have been reached to return (public) land over the course of decades, there is no discussion of extending this process to recuperate privately held land. This should remind us that the fearmongering over a threat of loss of privately held land in Canada is largely unfounded and exaggerated. Of course, we should discuss and prepare for what that may look like, but it is not the immediate issue at stake. By the way, while it’s encouraging to learn that thousands of hectares have been returned to Māori, it still represents only a small fraction of the millions of acres they lost to British settlers over the 200 years post-contact.

To understand the current state of Indigenous land settlements in Aotearoa, you have to first understand the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) and the breaches that ensued for the century that followed. After James Cook charted the coasts of Aotearoa in 1769, fishermen, traders, and Christian missionaries arrived in increasing numbers to claim land. By the 1830s, tensions over land control were growing, eventually leading to the Treaty of Waitangi.

There are many issues with the treaty, but a major one has to do with the translations (a written translation of te reo was only 20 years old at this point, so there were still a lot of kinks to work out). Some iwi chiefs signed an English version of the treaty; many more signed the Māori version. (Others did not sign at all.) The two versions have several differences, perhaps most importantly the invocation of tino rangatiratanga in the Māori version but not in the English version. I mentioned tino rangatiratanga above; it roughly translates to chieftainship, but it also references sovereignty, and is a deeply significant principle for Māori people. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a Waitangi Tribunal was finally established with the authority to resolve land settlements and iron out the discrepancies between the two versions of the treaty.

After the treaty was signed, tauiwi violated its terms repeatedly by stealing land, banning te reo in schools, imprisoning Māori leaders, and on and on. Rina Te Ngahue, a Māori lawyer, explains it well in this TikTok video that went viral a couple years ago. She is referencing a failed legislative proposal from 2024, a “treaty principles bill,” that was an attempt to redefine the terms of the treaty to limit Māori rights. You may have heard about this at the time; several Māori members of parliament joined in a haka dance in protest. Thousands more marched in a hīkoi (demonstration).

Thus, Māori are tangata whenua—people of the land—and the people we’d typically call “settlers” in a North American context (i.e., the British and other immigrants who followed), are tangata tiriti—’the people of the treaty’.

While traveling these past few months, I’ve reflected a lot on both the privilege I have to be able to visit so many places, and on what it means to be a good guest (more on that in a future post). I find the movement toward more just land returns, however incomplete, inspiring and thought-provoking as a descendent of ‘settlers’ who stole land from Indigenous Peoples. Of course, the Aotearoa model isn’t the only one. I learned from my friend and colleague Lark about the ‘honor tax,’ an annual tax in Humboldt County (California) paid directly to the Wiyot People. Speaking of California, the state announced last week a long overdue land return to Indigenous tribes there—another instance to be celebrated, surely. Whatever we do to right relations with traditional Indigenous land stewards, I hope we can find more humility and critical reflection when we assert the ‘rights’ of land ownership.

There is a saying that when god made the earth, the left-over bits—deserts, mountains, volcanoes, lakes—were dropped into the long slice of the continent that is Chile. To me, Chile is like a sampler of all the best parts of South America. I had the pleasure of seeing the high-altitude Atacama Desert, the stunning central Andes, and peaceful litoral (coast) central.

Claudia and Ceci made it their personal mission to teach me as many Chilenismos as possible. The playful yet confounding slang and dialect of the language was one of my favorite things about this country. Chilenismos range from charming to crude to clever to confusing.

Charming: “eres mi cachito de manjar.” ❤️ Cachito de manjar is an absurdly delicious pastry with dulce de leche inside. It’s an adorably Chilean way to say, “you’re my sweetheart.”

Crude: “dame tu machita (o cochayuyo).”🦪 Macha is a clam. Cochayuyo is a tubular seaweed (a kind of kelp?). I’ll let your dirty mind imagine the context for these dichos.

Clever: “es mas bueno que el pan” simply means “it’s better than bread,” and it might be my new favorite Spanish expression. 🍞 It’s just so perfect.

Confusing: Somehow, you can say “los pasamos la raja” when you’re having a good time; it literally translates to “we had an ass crack.” 🤣 But you would say “era como el hoyo” when something was bad; hoyo referring to an asshole.

I learned about “perro muerto” [dead dog], which is Chilean for “dine and dash.” I loved hearing my friends’ interpretations of this expression. Turns out the etymology likely relates to disarming the guard dog who would fend off customers trying to evade payment.

Paola, Ceci, and Clau also introduced me to traditional and politically significant Chilean musicians, like Victor Jara and Quilapayún. I was thrilled to learn that the familiar protest chant “the people united will never be defeated” has its origins in the socialist movements of Chile. This genre of music was serendipitously featured on my favorite podcast (Throughline), last week!

My previous attempt at a Latino nickname hadn’t caught on, so I asked Clau and Ceci to help me with a new apodo. They gave me the nickname “Jota,” (“J”), which is just perfect. I was very excited to get our empanada order called out to “Jota” by a confused yet endearing restaurant clerk.

While I managed to learn a ton of Chilenismos, I never felt confident pulling them out in conversation. Some of them are vulgar, and I could never tell if using them might cause offense. But with my new friends encouraging me, I tried out a few of them in that safe space. On one of our last nights together, we were watching sunset on the beach and saw a young couple embracing at the waterfront. “How sweet,” my friend cooed. “Dame tu macha,” I replied. It landed. 🙈

I’m now in Aotearoa (New Zealand). I stayed on Waiheke Island with a colleague who also works on conversion therapy research. On Saturday, he took me to the Waiheke Island farmers market, where I immediately picked up on conversation in Spanish. I looked over to see a mate stand, alongside an empanada stand. Turns out there is a work tourism program bringing Argentinians to Aotearoa. The transition felt a little more gentle.

Rapa Nui is magical. Unlike Hawaii (cf. Bad Bunny’s “LO QUE PASÓ A HAWAii”), Rapa Nui has no extractive foreign businesses. The Rapa Nui people have repeatedly decided to forbid property ownership by those who are not Rapa Nui (also the name of the people who have lived on the island for 1000 years). In fact, earlier this year the island’s residents overwhelming (87%) voted against a Chilean government proposal to open the island to foreign investment—a case study in decolonization. The result is that guesthouses and businesses are hyper-local, in a way you can see and experience. There are no mega-resorts. No buildings taller than two stories. No chain restaurants or hotels.

We were fortunate to get to know the owner of the inn where we stayed—a fierce and brilliant Rapa Nui woman named Bicky. Bicky is currently fighting to change the gendered rules of the Consejo de Ancianos de Rapa Nui, a hereditary governing Elders Council. The Consejo de Ancianos is constituted by elders representing each of the 36 families on the island. When an elder steps down, the position is handed to the eldest living son; Bicky intends to take her family’s position when the time comes.

We also met island residents who are not Rapa Nui (about half of the population). Most are Chilean, from el continente. Almost all of them have a story about how they were magnetically pulled to the island, unable to leave once they first visited. There are, in fact, magnetic fields on Rapa Nui, which is apparently not uncommon for volcanic islands. One driver told me that a large oval magnetic stone called Te Pito Kura explains some of the island’s special energy. Te Pito Kura is typically translated to “Navel of Light” or “Navel of the World” in English, reflecting the Rapa Nui belief that it is the center of the world, containing powerful mana (energy). I prefer the Spanish translation, “Ombligo de Luz” or “Ombligo del Mundo,” umbilicus more immediately reminding us of where we come from.

Of course, a generous share of the magic of Rapa Nui surely comes from the approximately 1,000 Moái statues protecting the Rapa Nui people. Many mysteries surround the Moái, though there is no doubt they have tremendous significance when it comes to Rapa Nui culture and engineering. Each Moái represents an ancestor, usually someone of high social status or importance to a family. The biggest Moái weighs over 82,000 kilograms and is 10 meters high. No one knows exactly how these enormous statues made it from the quarry where they were carved—a site I visited on one of the tours—to various spots throughout the island. Theories abound to explain this remarkable feat.

Some theories propose that the Moái were transported atop moving or sliding tools, like logs or sleds. But the currently preferred theory is that they walked—some of them up to 20 kilometers!—to their current sites. This is the oral history passed down to the Rapa Nui. Imagine how you would move a refrigerator across a surface, tilting the tall and heavy object side to side. However they were moved, it took an enormous human energy and ingenuity.

The backsides of the Moái include inscriptions that likely tell us something about the lives of the ancestors they represent. Sadly, the Rapa Nui have lost the ability to decipher the rongo rongo hieroglyphic language in which the inscriptions are written. Slavery raids removed the vast majority of the Rapa Nui population from the island in the 1860s, leaving only about 100 people behind, and taking the last of those who could read the glyphs.

In the midst of these raids, some British dude stole a Moái (what a tired story) and gifted it to the Queen. It now resides in the British Museum in London. The Rapa Nui call it Hoa Hakananai’a, or amigo robado—the stolen friend. Paola sent me this moving ceremony that some Rapa Nui performed upon visiting amigo robado last year.

We were fortunate enough to be on Rapa Nui during Tapati, an annual festival and competition celebrating Rapa Nui culture. One of my guides told me that the festival was created to boost tourism, but I don’t buy it. My favorite moment on the island was watching Rapa Nui children stare with pride and amazement at the stunning shows of music, dance, and art on stage.

While the mysteries of the Moái enchant all visitors, I was most preoccupied with the mystery of the chickens. I knew that I should expect to see some chickens after watching Moana a million times with my nieces (Rapa Nui being a Polynesian island), but I didn’t know there would be so many chickens. And I didn’t realize they were feral. The first morning, I was awoken by a rooster who got increasingly closer to the door of my cabin. He really wanted to wake me. Just when I was about to scream at him, I heard Paola outside sweetly coaxing him to leave in Spanish (thank god, because my Spanish is now good but not that good).

When I would ask people on the island: why are there so many chickens?, they would reply by saying that chickens reproduce quickly. Or: “don’t blame me, they’re not my chickens,” when they could tell I was annoyed by the constant crowing. But that didn’t answer, for me, the fundamental question: Why are they tolerated when they make so much noise—at all hours of the day?! On our last day on Rapa Nui, I finally got the answer. A guide was showing me a haré moa, a short building with small doors.

Haré moa is Rapa Nui for chicken coop. After the guide showed me one, I spotted them everywhere. When the Rapa Nui people first settled on the island—coming from Marae Toe Hau (possibly the Cook Islands)—they brought with them chickens. My hypothesis is that the Rapa Nui hold chickens in esteem because they harken back to the ancestors.

Eventually, the chickens became feral and ubiquitous. While doing research for this post, I came across a study that traced the sequence and timing of the colonization of the Pacific by sequencing chicken DNA. Rapa Nui was the last of the south Pacific islands to be reached. I’m sparing you a which came first joke here. It was the chickens.

Now, at the tail end of my four months in South America, I am reflecting on one of the biggest impediments to learning Spanish here: the mind-boggling linguistic diversity across this continent—not only in accents but in lexicons. One amusing example: the word for Capybara varies geographically; in Colombia these adorable semi-aquatic creatures are known as chihuiros, in Perú as ronsocos, and in Uruguay and Argentina as carpinchos. I am also doubting this assertion about Colombia being the best country for learning Spanish and want to take the opportunity to rank countries I’ve visited according to ease of comprehension—in case any of you are considering a Spanish immersion experience or have the opportunity to recommend one to a friend.

1. Bolivia

Some may say I’m biased because I loved Bolivia for many other reasons, but I insist I was the most effective at understanding and expressing Spanish in Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia (see what I did there? —snuck in another glorious fact about Bolivia: its commitment to the multiethnic population is baked into the official country name). Forty percent of Bolivians speak Spanish as a second language and an Indigenous language like Quechua or Aymara as their first. My hypothesis is that the abundance of people speaking Spanish as a second language leads to a slower and less vernacular dialect.

2. Peru

These are all generalizations, but Peruvian Spanish is known to be proper (following the rules we learn in the classroom) and formal (see my comments about Argentinian Spanish, by comparison, below). Of course, there is still slang, but I would say I managed to understand about 70% of the Spanish I heard in Peru.

3. Colombia

Contrary to the promises and predictions, I found that people in Colombia spoke quickly and with a generous amount of slang. Slang varied regionally, sometimes in baffling ways. For example, traffic jams are called “tacos” in Medellin, but “tracones” in Bogota. Some slang words can vary in meaning to the extreme of meaning opposite things. Case in point: “una chimba” means something that’s very cool, but un chimbo—and sometimes “una chimba” (wtf)—is something cheap, and bad. Others were contrary to their meanings in other Spanish-speaking countries. “Marica” is used ubiquitously, especially among men, to mean “bro,” which startled and confused me because in Mexico and other countries, it is closely related to the word used for “faggot.”

4/5. Argentina/Uruguay

I could not detect much difference between the Spanish spoken in Argentina and Uruguay. They seem to share much of their cultures, including a love of parrillas and the use of “vos” tense. One tour guide told me that the two countries were siblings, with Uruguay being the calm, stable one with a steady job and Argentina being the chaotic one who is always in some sort of crisis. In Buenos Aires, people would joke that Uruguay was a neighborhood of the city.

The accent in Argentina wasn’t as difficult to understand as I was expecting, but people do speak quickly, and the slang is on another level. “Tipo” is used to mean “approximately” (estoy libre tipo a las 2 o 3… I’m free around 2 or 3), but also “for example,” and as a filler word similar to “like” in English. “Boludo” (literally means someone with large balls) is even more versatile. It could mean ‘bro’ (like ‘marica’ in Colombia), or it could mean something or someone who is dumb. As a foreigner, I never dared use the word “boludo” in conversation, for fear of conveying the wrong meaning.

Much of the slang in Argentina and Urugay have their origins in an argot (a group- or class-specific jargon) called Lunfardo. Lunfardo originated with prisoners in 19th century Argentina but further developed through Tango and other immigrant spaces in Buenos Aires. Lunfardo slang include words in “verse” (a form of reversing syllables in Spanish): café becomes feca; mujer becomes jermu; peso becomes sope. I promise I’m not making this shit up.

6. Chile

Chilean Spanish is practically a distinct language. If I understood 70% of the Spanish I heard in Bolivia, I understand about 30% in Chile. For some reason I still cannot fathom, Chileans add “-po” to the end of various words. “Boludo” would be weón in Chilean. And don’t get me started on “wea.” It doesn’t matter how many explainer videos I watch, I cannot understand if “wea” refers to something good or bad, even with ample context.

The other day, I double-checked Claude’s recommendations for Spanish-speaking countries with the greatest ease of comprehension. Again, it suggested Colombia. “Why didn’t you recommend Bolivia?” I asked. “I didn’t mention Bolivia mainly because it’s not as commonly talked about or marketed as a Spanish-learning destination, so fewer people know about it as an option.” One more example of the tautological idiocy of genAI.

Speaking of Lunfardo, one of the more fascinating things I learned in Argentina was the argot, or anti-language, of Carrilche. It’s similar to Polari, which I first learned about upon a visit to the Canadian Museum of Immigration in Halifax in 2011, but way spicier. The argot developed as a way for LGBT people to communicate surreptitiously with one another in the 1940s and 50s. Much of the Carliche slang continues in use in Argentina today. “Travesti” has been reappropriated as a term that is inclusive of non-binary people and political activism for gender equity in South America. “Torta” is a term for lesbians that I was surprised to see in various venues I visited in Argentina. “Paqui” is used to refer to cishet people; I am unsettled by the obvious racialized aspects of the term, especially in English but surely also in Spanish?

While I was struggling with all this slang, I asked a Spanish tutor to please help me iron out the rationale for this enormous geographic variability. He told me that English was worse—i.e., I should check my Anglophone privilege, oops—and then told me about a children’s play language called “hoopla” (also called Jeringonza in Spanish). It’s a lot like Pig Latin. “Travis” becomes “Trapa Vispi”—after every syllable you put a “p” and then repeat the vowel. ¡Chimpi bapa bopo lupu dopo!

I spent the last few weeks of December with my friend Phyllis, who graciously hosted me in Uruguay.

Phyllis is a lifelong student of Latin American (and world) history, so I’m always getting reading recommendations from her. Last fall, she shared a syllabus from a UBC course she was taking, Human and Civil Rights in Latin America. One of their assigned readings included Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire series (1987). This excerpt, entitled “The Creation according to John D. Rockefeller,” caught my eye (emphasis is mine):

In the beginning I made light with a kerosene lamp, and the darkness. And the shadows, which mocked tallow sperm candles, retreated. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And on the second day god put me to the test and allowed the devil to tempt me, offering me friends and lovers and other extravagances.

And I said, “Let petroleum come to me”. And I founded Standard Oil. And I saw that it was good, and the evening and the morning were the third day.

And on the fourth day I followed the example of god. Like him, I threatened and cursed anyone refusing me obedience; and like him I applied extortion and punishment. As god has crushed his competitors, so I pitifully pulverized my rivals in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. And to those who should repent I promised forgiveness and eternal peace.

And I put an end to the disorder of the Universe. And where there was chaos I made organization. And on a yet unknown scale I calculated costs, imposed prices, and conquered markets. And I distributed the force of millions of arms so that neither time nor energy nor material might ever again be wasted. And I banished chance and luck from the history of mankind. And in the space created by me, I reserved no space for the weak, nor for the inefficient. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

And to give a name to my work I coined the word “trust”. And I saw that it was good. And I made sure that the world revolved around my watchful eyes, while the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

And on the seventh day I performed an act of charity. I took the money which god had given to me for having continued his perfect work, and I gave 25 cents to the poor. And then I rested.

Eduardo Galeano was a prolific Uruguayan writer and journalist. Countless Latin Americans—most notably my dear friend and colleague Paola Ardiles Gamboa—have recommended his famous text Open Veins of Latin America during my sabbatical travels. I finally read it cover to cover while I was in his home country.

Open Veins is poetic, evocative, and unwaveringly focused on the experiences of Latin American people. It does not read like an event-by-event accounting of history; rather, it uses a narrative style, weaving together historical observations to paint a larger picture to explain how Latin America has been systematically exploited, first by European and then by US business (capitalist) and military coalitions. The book was published in 1971, but to be honest, I spent many pages shaking my head because it felt like he was writing today.

I can’t do justice to the depth and elegance of Galeano’s arguments here, but I will mention a few of the major themes. Perhaps most famously, Open Veins outlines dependency theory. He argues that—contrary to what I was taught as a kid—there is no linear path from country-level underdevelopment to so-called “economic development.” In fact, wealthy nations like the US have systematically kept poor countries underdeveloped by design, and they have done so through repeated similar trade and investment schemes, exploiting Latin America (and other global south geographies) for “cheap” natural resources and “cheap” labor. He gives ample cases across centuries of history to leave no doubt that this pattern is entrenched and intentional.

I finished the book on the day after the US government invaded Venezuela and abducted Maduro. On a ferry from Montevideo to Buenos Aires, conversations around me were peppered with mentions of Trump and Maduro. Getting my hair cut at a barber shop later that day, I strained to listen carefully to the barbers’ and clients’ tense conversations—their accents and vernacular slang truly stretching my Spanish comprehension abilities. Given the events of the day, I feel compelled to mention another important theme from Galeano’s analysis of US “interventions” in Latin America. There is a long history of partnerships between global north (especially US) military and businesses to identify strategic geographies to keep markets open to US interests (message me for a list of these). Empires have repeatedly justified these actions in the name of peace or stability.

Galeano also details fundamental and historical bases for the differences in the trajectories of the economies of North and South Americas. This was huge learning for me as a US-born person (I’ve stopped referring to my nationality as American because I am constantly reminded here that there twice as many Americans living south of the Río Grande as those living to the north; here, they call us Estadounidenses). He writes,

New England colonists, the original nucleus of U.S. civilization, never acted as colonial agents for European capitalist accumulation; their own development, and the development of their new land, were always their motivation.

Of course, enslavement of and plantation labor by people of African descent ultimately drove the US economy, but this was in service of wealth accumulated by European settlers who remained in North America—my ancestors. By contrast, colonizers who settled in South America sought resources to be returned to Europe. Galeano characterizes these as disparate systems of internal colonization, which help to explain contemporary differences between the continents.

Moreover, minerals and natural resources in North America were hidden in early centuries of colonization, inaccessible beneath frozen soils. By contrast, the soils of South America were a fertile curse. In addition to being a story of open veins, this book is a story of warm veins. Extraordinary volumes of silver, gold, and copper were extracted in the early period of colonization of South America, rushed to hungry Europe. Galeano’s descriptions of the working and living conditions of Indigenous and African workers of the mines of Potosí are some of the most heart-wrenching historical texts I’ve ever read. Most figures place the number killed at eight million. And, of course, the extraction hasn’t ceased. Lithium and petroleum are now added to the long list of resource demands my home country places on these lands. Not to mention timber and agricultural exports, which I wrote about previously.

After this book was published (1971), it was promptly banned in multiple countries. It was a time of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. In the southern cone, persecution of leftist writers, political leaders, activists, and artists was coordinated through Operation Condor, perpetrated by the governments in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, with instrumental support from US intelligence agencies. This led to Galeano’s exile.

Reading this book and digging into more modern sources that build on it underlines the impoverished education I received growing up in the US. I remember being taken aback on my first tour in Bogotá when the guide mentioned Colombia’s loss of Panama due to US intervention at the end of the 19th century. My myopic understanding of those events related simply to the US’s need for a nautical shipping route through the Americas. Even after university, I could not have identified more than three Latin American countries on a map (shame on me). I had a similar experience when I went to East Africa with Fayyaz in 2024 and read Dipo Faloyin’s Africa is Not a Country. I wonder if US people would have less tolerance for our government’s geopolitical assertions if we had proper educations in world (meaning, the world beyond Europe, ahem) histories. All to say, reading Open Veins was long overdue for me.

When I finished the book, I went back through my photos of my South American travels to-date. The ones that jumped out at me were from Bolivia—I suspect this is because I mostly traversed Bolivia by land, allowing me to see more rural areas of resource extraction.

In Potosí, I learned that there were 20,000 miners working inside of Cerro Rico that day. I can’t begin to imagine the working conditions (I declined a tour because of my claustrophobia). Still today, several workers die every month due to accidents, including tunnel collapses. Countless more die from silicosis (lung disease). I asked one of my guides if the miners are at least paid well by Bolivian standards; she just stared at me with a familiar look justly passed from Latinoamericanos to uninformed gringos.

Farther south in Bolivia, we passed a brand new lithium mining facility. The driver explained to me that it is not yet in production, but it’s just a matter of time. Our mobile phone batteries demand this mineral. More than half of the world’s supply is beneath the Uyuni Salt Flat.

On that same tour, we visited a train cemetery. Railways were demanded by British industrialists in the late 19th century to more efficiently move extracted resources to the coasts. The systems were built by Indigenous and Chinese workers. By World War I, the British had largely abandoned their investments in these systems, and as mineral sources depleted, the railroads became derelict. Here is a quote from Open Veins:

Railroads formed another decisive part of the cage of dependency: when monopoly capitalism was in flower, imperialist influence extended into the colonial economies’ remote backyards. Many of the loans were for financing railroads to bring minerals and foodstuffs to export terminals. The tracks were laid not to connect internal areas one with another, but to connect production centers with ports. The design still resembles the fingers of an open hand…

I’m now in Buenos Aires, where it is boiling hot (sorry, folks in Canada). I’m less exposed to rural resource extraction, but I’ve had the privilege of visiting a few museums, including Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Malba) and Museo Sitio de Memoria (ESMA).

At Malba, I was thrilled to find art by Alejandro Mario Yllanes, an Aymara (Bolivian) artist who used a style that reminded me of the post-Mexican revolution muralists.

When I saw Trajedia del Pongo, I first noticed the conquistador strangling an Incan warrior (bottom-right) and next noticed the oil derricks above him. I was excited to discover Yllanes because I had seen similar art in Bolivia but didn’t have much context or back-story. Story goes that Yllanes was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the 1940s but never appeared in NYC to claim the award; he is thought to have died in Mexico in the 1960s.

At ESMA, I witnessed the relics of the Argentinian dictatorship’s machine of terror (1970s-80s). It was haunting and terrifying. Tens of thousands were ‘disappeared’, and at ESMA, I saw the sites where they were detained and tortured.

I was buoyed by the stories of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They fought, and continue to fight, to know the whereabouts of their family who were disappeared. In the spirit of reconciliation and truth-telling, I am compelled to mention that my country’s government played a key role in these disappearances—in the name of… ?

I don’t need to make explicit the connections to what’s happening in Venezuela. Political critiques of US actions are consistent with what I hear from most Latin Americans, namely that there is no reason for hope in what the US promises from yet another “intervention”, whether its purpose is to extract oil or remove an undemocratic leader.

I’ve met Venezuelans in every country I’ve visited. They have been pushed out of their home country owing to economic and political pressures, and they are unjustly maligned by leaders of other countries who have adopted the rhetoric of the north, that as immigrants, they are the enemy. And now, they face yet another assault by multinational oligarchs who lay claim to their natural resources. I try not to ask them too many questions about their home country. I can’t imagine what it’s like to live through this kind of cumulative political manipulation and injustice.

Visiting the ESMA museum made the mechanisms at play in my own country’s government crystal clear: authoritarianism, terror, and a repeat of the exploitation of warm veins that Galeano detailed in his writing 55 years ago. I was recently listening to a CBC podcast in which the interviewee commented on how the climate of Venezuela provided an advantage over western Canadian oil mining, simply because the warmer soil made for less viscous bitumen.

Galeano’s writing and Las Abuelas have me thinking in a new light about the current state of affairs in (and caused by) my home country. Galeano reaffirms the fundamental truth of Angela Davis’s oft-repeated quote: “We are produced by history.” And the Abuelas remind me of another of Davis’s teachings: we have to continue the fight, the resistance, through education, organizing, and whatever means we can.

While at the ESMA museum, I learned about another Latin American exiled during the 1970s, Mercedes Sosa (also introduced to me by my friend Paola). Her song Cuando tenga la tierra is fitting:

Cuando tenga la tierra…

Secaré con mis lágrimas

Todo el horror de la lástima

Y por fin te veré, campesino.

Translated:

When I get the land…

I will use my tears to dry

All the shameful horror

And I will finally see you, peasant.

The book is organized into chapters based on the forms of evidence Tucker and his colleagues have amassed in their database—which had over 2000 cases, at the time of publishing his book in 2005. Some cases involved birthmarks that matched sites of physical trauma in the allegedly reincarnated decedents. In fact, many of the cases Tucker investigated involved traumatic deaths, which may help explain how/why the memory and consciousness remain vivid to the children who inherit them. Others involved remarkably specific statements by the child about a previous life—often pointing to later verified facts that could not otherwise be known to the child. Others still involved behaviors (e.g., love of a particular and unusual food) that reflect characteristics or preferences of the decedent.

I’ll give you one example that stood out to me: Kendra started swimming lessons with a woman named Ginger at age 4 and immediately developed a very strong bond with her coach. Kendra explained to her mother that she had been a baby in Ginger’s tummy, when Ginger was very sick; Kendra seemed to be unable to shake a fear of dying, related to this history. Eventually, the mother confirmed that Ginger indeed had an abortion 9 years before Kendra was born. The mother uneasily agreed to allow Kendra to continue spending time with Ginger, but eventually Ginger and the mother had a falling out, leading to Ginger no longer wanting to see Kendra.

Tucker methodically works through this case, and numerous others, carefully evaluating all of the possible ‘normal’ explanations for reports like Kendra’s. The idea that Kendra’s mother (or another family member) would have introduced this story is implausible—the mother did not believe in reincarnation and was clearly uncomfortable with her daughter’s disclosures. Likewise, the hypothesis that Kendra would have fabricated these memories seems highly unlikely—how would a 4 year old come to think she had been aborted? The number and nature of these cases, along with Tucker’s dispassionate presentation of evidence makes it hard not to concede that reincarnation—or what Tucker would call a passing of consciousness—is the most probable unifying explanation.

What most astounded me about the book was Tucker’s unabashed application of scientific methodologies to investigate a paranormal phenomenon. I resisted conceding the validity of Tucker’s investigations for most of the book, until the part where he asks the reader: are you resisting because of some evidence contrary to the reincarnation hypothesis or because of a cultural script that regards reincarnation as fantastical or absurd? Guilty as accused.

Carl Sagan—a staunch scientific naturalist—identified this body of research regarding children’s memories of past lives (brought to Sagan’s attention by Tucker’s predecessor Ian Stevenson) as one of the few paranormal phenomena warranting further scientific study. Sagan’s worldview included a humility within scientific inquiry that accommodated the yet-unknown aspects of the human spirit, or soul.

More recently, I read a book about the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. The author recounts a talk Sacks gave at the NY Public Library in the early 80s. I was heartened to read the title of Sack’s talk: “Neurology and the Soul.” He argues that an objective science of the purely physiological and mechanistic aspects of neurology “offends common sense and one’s own egotism.” He goes on to say, “I can provide no sense to the notion of a dismembered soul.”

All to say, there is plenty of room within (western) scientific thinking to try to understand what happens to our soul after, or between, lives. So why is there so much resistance? Tucker addresses this, referencing the notion of consilience, a concept defined by biologist E.O. Wilson as triangulating knowledge between different fields of study. This concept is familiar to me as an epidemiologist; we often reference the Bradford Hill criteria when assessing evidence for causality. Hill’s criterion of ‘coherence’ similarly refers to concordance between different fields of study—typically laboratory sciences and epidemiology. The problem, as Tucker notes, is when lack of extant consilience, or coherence, is used to dismiss novel or unconventional findings. This quote from Tucker’s book struck a chord for me:

Though many people in scientific fields hold views that can be just as dogmatic as those of an intensely religious person, judging from firmly held beliefs does not make for sound scientific inquiry.

If reincarnation, or transfer of consciousness, is something real that has been dismissed due to dogmatic blindness of religion, cultural beliefs, or science, what else might be true from the category we call paranormal? People close to me have had announcing dreams, connections with the dead, and guidance from psychics that serves them more deeply than years of western modalities of therapy. After reading Life Before Life, I started to reflect on my own experience with empirical (and scientific) observations that run against mainstream, and I would argue dogmatic, scientific thought.

In 2008-2010, I supported a suite of studies that detected an increased risk of pandemic H1N1 influenza among those who were previously vaccinated for seasonal influenza. The study findings were resisted and scrutinized, in part for lack of consilience/coherence—while we offered potential biological mechanisms to explain the phenomenon, the findings challenged the public health dogma of monolithic vaccine protection.

More recently, I co-led a study in which we found that a history of antidepressant use in adolescents was associated with a 14-fold increased odds of genital numbness. Again, resistance from those subscribing to biomedical dogma was significant. As with the seasonal influenza vaccine, there is no doubt that SSRIs/SNRIs have benefits for some patients. But if there are harms for others, these surely should be documented and not suppressed.

What other phenomena are understudied, marginalized, or rejected for lack of so called consilience? In his book, Tucker cites examples of scientists who have historically challenged dogmatic ideas with great punishment, including Galileo who claimed that the sun was the center of the solar system, Semmelweis who claimed that hand-washing reduced perinatal infections, and Wegener who claimed that the current configuration of continental landmasses was the product of continental drift.

In this era of mis- and dis-information, I would argue that we need to remain on guard about dogmatic beliefs, even if those beliefs are “correct” on balance (e.g., the protective benefits of vaccines).

While in South America, I’ve asked many people about their beliefs regarding reincarnation. A majority of Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, while a large plurality of those from other religions (31% of those in the US!) believe in reincarnation. I didn’t meet anyone in South America who acknowledged that they believe in reincarnation, though I learned a lot about Incan ideas of life after death. Incans famously—and tragically—performed ritualistic sacrifice of children, called Capacocha.

When I was in Arequipa, in the south of Perú, I visited a museum with the so-called Mummy Juanita. I say “so-called” because I’m not sure mummy is an accurate term. Juanita was sacrificed in the 15th century, likely in order to appease Incan Gods in response to the eruption of the Misti Volcano. Her body was perfectly preserved, along with several artefacts left in her grave, owing to the freezing conditions and surrounding volcanic eruption. I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures inside the Juanita museum, but the display included a full replica of the recovered body of Juanita, and my honest impression was that she looked absolutely terrified. Indeed, forensic studies concluded that Juanita died due to blunt trauma to the head. If this is true, then perhaps she was in fact reincarnated—thinking of the high prevalence of traumatic injury deaths in Tucker’s studies.

When I asked Eder from the Uros Islands about reincarnation, he explained that the Lupihaques do not believe in reincarnation in the sense of individuals passing their consciousness on to other individuals, but they do believe that your spirit returns to a communal, or collective, and that you should return it better than you found it. I am grateful to Tucker, Juanita, and Eder for teaching me humility, and for challenging my baseline beliefs about the fates of our souls.

I can count on one hand the number of people who gave me travel recommendations for Bolivia—contrasted to dozens of recommendations for Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. The limited attention Bolivia receives by North American tourists is entirely unjust. It is hands down my favorite country visited so far.

Bolivia has two flags: the red-yellow-green flag that represents the state of Bolivia, and the wiphala, a flag that represents Indigenous Peoples throughout the Andes. (I am currently in Chile, where I also see the wiphala flying in various communities.)

The colors of the wiphala represent time (white), nature (green), the universe (blue), self-determination (violet), the earth (red), society (orange), and strength (yellow).

Bolivia also has two capitals. La Paz—which I had previously assumed was the capital—is the seat of the legislative and executive branches, while Sucré is the historical and constitutional capital, and the seat of the judicial branch.

I love that throughout Bolivia I constantly saw people wearing traditional clothing in everyday life, even walking around bustling La Paz. Polleras (festive, layered skirts), ponchos, bowler hats, chullos (woven hats), and shawls are ubiquitous, often with Indigenous Andean designs, always with a lot of color.

Honestly, Bolivia has it all: mountains, lakes, bustling cities, remarkably diverse cuisine, delicious potatoes, and the world’s largest salt flat. La Paz is stunningly beautiful and colorful in every direction and form. It also has one of the most efficient and well designed public transit systems I’ve encountered, the teleférico.

One thing Bolivia does not have is an ocean coastline. It lost access to the sea after being defeated by Chile in the War of the Pacific (1880s). Despite this, Bolivia does maintain a navy, based in Lake Titicaca, which I wrote about last week. They maintain a navy in the hopes that one day they will regain a sea port.

My favorite question to ask Bolivianos is: ¿Cuál es tu papa favorita? (what’s your favorite potato?). I rarely heard the same answer twice, a sign of the breadth of potatoes on offer. And every answer was an immediate and enthusiastic one, a sign of the passion Bolivians have for their native tubers.

Their favorite question to ask me was if I had a wife or kids. My answer—I couldn’t spend this much time traveling and exploring South America and leave my wife and kids at home—generally satisfied them. Their second favorite question was: how does it feel to be hosting the World Cup in Canada next year? My answer to this question was less satisfying. Not only am I not a soccer fan, I won’t be back in Canada until after the World Cup (I only shared the second part with them, to ease the blow).

Just before I arrived, Bolivians elected their first right-wing president in 20 years. When I crossed the border into Chile, Chileans elected the most right-wing leader in that country since Pinochet—José Antonio Kast, the son of a Nazi soldier who immigrated to Chile in 1950. During the 1988 Chilean plebiscite that returned Chile to democracy, Kast publicly expressed his admiration for dictator Pinochet. This is a part of a larger Latin American, if not global, political trend—the opposite of a pink tide. Perhaps McDonald’s will return to Bolivia. I sure hope not.

At 3,800 meters elevation, this was the highest place I’ve been in the world. I felt it. Breathing was difficult for me (even after being at other high-elevation sites like Bogotá and Cuzco), and I experienced some vision loss, also called high altitude retinopathy, which thankfully resolved one day after I left Lake Titicaca.

The islands are made of multiple layers of extraordinarily strong, water-resistant totora roots. The totora plant is a hardy sedge that grows naturally in the northern part of Lake Titicaca. Eder showed me the roots of a young totora plant.

When mature, the totora plants are harvested and layered over and over again to create floating islands. The dry reeds on the surface of the island are layered a meter or so atop a root clump foundation 5-10 times that depth. I asked Eder how often they have to replace the roots. “Every week,” he replied. Every day is a workday for Eder. Peruvian-American artist Grimanesa Amorós explains it like this: “What struck me the most was how the islands and homes are in a constant state of flux, of creation and decay… This ephemerality is magical.”

And then, we ate the totora, raw. Here is Eder peeling it—you can see why they call it “lake banana”. It tasted like jícama.

There are currently somewhere between 100 and 200 floating islands, inhabited by over 1,000 Lupihaques people. Eder pointed out islands that house primary schools (for secondary education they have to go to the city), markets, daycares, and even a soccer field. I asked Eder if he had family living on the islands. “They are all my family,” he said.

Eder’s family have lived on these islands for over 500 years, predating the arrival of the Incas. He is proud of his ancestry and especially of how the Lupihaques People have maintained their traditions despite contemporary neoliberal forces. He has two children, 5 and 7 years old. Eder sends them to the mainland for school because he wants them to have the option of going to university and leaving Lake Titicaca when they’re older, if they choose.

Large-scale tourism is a real threat to Eder’s livelihood. Tour operators from the mainland are increasingly bringing tourists in large numbers to the floating islands. At the market, I bought a Lupihaques tapestry for which I paid 120 soles (45 CAD). Eder—unlike many tour operators—took none of this money. “She is my cousin,” he said afterwards. “Not really, but everyone here is my cousin.”

The Indigenous gods/spirits shown in this tapestry include pachatata (protector of the mountains), pachamama (protector of the earth), and mamacota (protector of the waters).

Eder never wanted to be an AirBnB host. He agreed to take it up 6 or so years ago, at the urging of his father and brother. Mind you, he was the best host I’ve had in countless AirBnB experiences, but I take his point. He wanted to be a fisherman.

“Can you be both?” I asked him. He said “yes, with time.” But I know something is lost here.

If you know me, you know I am not one for fishing. But when Eder knocked on my door in the early morning and asked me if I wanted to come fishing with him, how could I say no?

“We” caught five small fish by the second day. He fed these small fish to larger trout fish, who were kept in a contained pen. If left to the wild, they would eat all of the fish in Lake Titicaca, trout being much larger and more predatory than the other native fish. Eder explained that trout are not native fish in Lake Titicaca. “Trout eggs are brought in every week by Canadians,” Eder told me.

Of course, I was very curious to know more about this. I asked him if he knew where in Canada they came from. He didn’t know. He’s not the only person who told me Canada is routinely supplying trout to Lake Titicaca. The taxi driver who took me from Puno (the port near the floating islands) to the Bolivian border also mentioned this, without even knowing that I live in Canada. There are a lot of trout farms in the southern part of the lake, leading up to the Bolivian border.

The source of the trout has preoccupied me since leaving Lake Titicaca. I can’t find any information about the transfer of trout eggs from Canada to Perú, or Bolivia. When I dug into the literature about the origin of trout introduced to Lake Titicaca (1940s or 50s), I found scholarly articles that point to the United States or Chile and a Smithsonian article pointing to the US. I even found a 1970s scholarly article about the worldwide distribution of trout by a Canadian researcher who attributes the Lake Titicaca trout to the US and Chile. Nothing about Canadian trout.

Perhaps the source of the trout changed over the years? I also checked recent (2023-24) government trade reports, and neither the Canadian reports nor the Peruvian/Bolivian reports (Lake Titicaca spans both countries) indicate transport of Canadian trout to Lake Titicaca. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence of Peruvian fish coming to Canada.

I should let it go, but I can’t. If you have a theory or suggestion for how to resolve this mystery, please let me know. These are the things that occupy the sabbatical mind.

Regardless, I’m grateful to have known Eder and his family. I hope their family continue trout fishing for many millennia to come.

If you know me, you know that I am not generally one for extreme outdoors or backcountry adventures. However, our time on Las Piedras River in the Amazon stands out as one of the most awe-inspiring sites of my travels so far.

First, some context about the varied ecosystems of Perú. The high altitude Andes—where Machu Picchu is situated—and the coastal deserts surrounding Lima are the most visited regions of the country. But the Amazon is the largest, covering 60% of the country’s landmass. I learned from a Peruvian history book that Peruvian geography played a key role in the political tensions between right-leaning and centralist federal leaders and interests of the largely Indigenous rural populations. Political scientist Cynthia McClintock writes:

“Not only was the ethnic divide between white descendants of Europeans and Indigenous peoples wide, but it was also reinforced by geography. Whereas the capital cities of Peru’s Andean neighbors are in the mountains, Lima is on the coast, and the mountains between Lima and Peru’s Indigenous population centers are exceptionally steep. Accordingly, the distinct ethnic groups in Peru interacted less frequently than the distinct ethnic groups in other Latin American countries.”

Fayyaz and I stayed at an ecological sanctuary that aims to safeguard increasing swaths of the Peruvian rainforest from logging and mining. I will admit that I was initially skeptical about the mission of the sanctuary, largely owing to the profile of its co-founder, Paul Rosalie. Neither Fayyaz nor I had heard about Rosalie before coming to Perú, but nearly every other guest at the lodge came specifically because they had seen him on one or another nature TV show. My skepticism comes from having trained in public health, where I became attuned to a ‘white saviour’ industrial complex (Teju Cole), which characterizes the approach of some (though not all) global health students and scholars.

Over the course of our stay, I was persuaded to reconsider the significance of the work of the Jungle Keepers—Rosalie’s organization. My change of heart was almost entirely attributable to our passionate guide, Victor.

Victor is from the Madre de Dios region, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. When he was younger, he worked as a logger, but he was subsequently convinced to join the eco-tourism movement and become a jungle keeper. His knowledge of the plants and animals of his native jungle is profound. He introduced us to five species of monkeys, countless species of birds (most notably, we saw over 100 macaws feeding on a clay lick), frogs, caimans, and trees bearing delicious jungle fruits—white cocoa, camu camu berries, mangos, on and on. Victor is now studying to become an Indigenous medical practitioner, using the plants of the Amazon to heal others in his community.

I was sad to learn the degree to which corruption, ignorance, and indifference contribute to ongoing deforestation in the Amazon. Back in BC, my friend and colleague Lyana Patrick recently documented the entrenched and protected interests of Rio Tinto, who have dammed the Nechako River, depriving Stellat’en and Saik’uz First Nations of their water rights (if you haven’t yet seen it, I highly recommend watching Nechako: It Will be a Big River Again). I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic, and I am hoping to learn more about how these multinational interests are playing out in Perú, and elsewhere in South America (recommendations welcomed).

Victor imparted to us a fascination with the species of the Amazon. Fayyaz’s favorite species was the ronsoco (or capybara). Neither of us had heard of this species before the trip, so we were dumbfounded to encounter an animal that looked like a cross between a rabbit, a hippo (they are large, up to 80kg!), and a duck (they have webbed feet). This photo does not do justice to this bizarre creature:

My favorite was the ceiba, or grandmother tree. Victor told us that the ceiba tree has spiritual significance for his people, and it is used in ceremony, during which they receive the whispers of their grandmothers, teaching them about medicinal plants and paths for their future. We found one ceiba tree with a hollow space at the base of the trunk. When I stepped inside, the cacophony of the jungle quieted. I listened carefully for my own grandmothers’ words of wisdom.

A few days later, I found this beautiful art piece in Cuzco. The Spanish phrase reads: “The prayers of our grandmothers continue to protect us.” Las oraciones de nuestras abuelas nos siguen protegiendo.

Last week I went to Medellín with my dear friend Katie, who traveled from DC to visit me. We were fortunate to have an amazing tour guide, Daniel, who showed us around the city.

On one of the tours, we saw a mural of a giraffe with mushrooms growing out of its head (see below, by local artist Mdb13). Daniel interpreted this art by saying that truth is a relative thing, a matter of perspective. Giraffes symbolize flexibility and individuality, while mushrooms symbolize altered consciousnesses. He explained that in Colombia people must live with multiple truths.

“Multiple truths” sounds like a platitude, but the more I see and learn of Colombia, the more I appreciate the deeper meaning(s) of Daniel’s statement. One of the most impactful experiences I’ve had in Colombia was visiting Museo Casa de la Memoria, pictured below. (The English equivalent, “Memory House Museum,” truly does not do it justice.) Casa de la Memoria is a museum dedicated to exposing the memories of victims (and perpetrators) of the Colombian armed conflict.

I’ve lost count of the number of sites I’ve visited that commemorate various forms of internal violence in Colombia. In addition to Casa de la Memoria, there is Parque Memorial Inflexión—a beautiful and haunting wall that honors the 46,612 victims of narcotráfico (drug trafficking), also pictured below. El Memorial de las Ausencias (The Memorial of the Absences, see below) is a wall of pictures of people who’ve gone missing or been murdered in Comuna 13, a historically impoverished district from which Pablo Escobar recruited youth in the 1980s and 90s. And those are just the sites we saw in Medellín.

Despite accessing numerous articles, tours, museums, and documentaries (and one fairly dense history book) during my 6 weeks here, I still cannot wrap my mind around the recurrent periods of violence in Colombian history. The country experienced countless civil wars in the 19th century, a period known as La Violencia between the 1940s and 1960s, and one of the highest homicide rates in the world in the 1990s—the height of violence related to narcotráfico. The burden of internal violence is long and profound.

In North America, we have romanticized Escobar with a Netflix series. Here in Colombia, people cringe when you mention his name—not to mention the Netflix series. Nearly every Colombian adult today knows at least one person who was a victim to the intense violence of the 80s and 90s. They struggle with a desire to put this violent past behind them—hence the “don’t say his name” refrain, in reference to Escobar—and the need for truth and reconciliation. Colombian historians, such as Marcos Palacios, have cautioned against over-simplifying the dynamics of political violence in Colombia; in his book, Between Legitimacy and Violence, he writes about a struggle for the Colombian people to coalesce around a unifying founding national myth (which has contributed to social and political trust in other Latin American countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Chile). The consequence is a society that remains deeply fractured.

Beyond the narcotráficos, there are at least three, if not four, parties who warrant some attention when trying to understand the widespread violence in Colombia: the state military, the guerillas, and the paramilitaries, which correspond to regional divisions. In the 1990s, Marxist guerillas controlled much of the south (among other rural strongholds), the state military controlled the central region including the major cities, and right-wing paramilitaries (supported by the government) controlled the north, as described by Palacios in his book. I can’t do justice to the complexity of the conflicts between these parties in this Substack post, but I can recommend an excellent documentary: Colombia in My Arms (Colombia fue nuestra), which follows guerillas, politicians, oligarchs, and rural farmers during the signing of the 2016 peace agreement. Of course, a very important fourth party would be the US, especially the DEA. The US has a long history of military aid to Colombia, most notably including the formation of the Plan Colombia, initiated by President Clinton and executed by W Bush. In this context, Trump’s recent battle with President Petro marks a sharp turn in US-Colombian relations.

One of the most shocking truths I’ve learned in my time here is the “false positive scandal.” Part of Plan Colombia involved the US government supporting the “modernization” of the Colombian military, in order to more effectively suppress the violence related to conflicts with drug cartels and the guerillas. This enabled the Colombian military to reach into parts of the country that were previously unreachable (Colombia is a mountainous country, not easily traversed). Under the Uribe regime (2002-2010), there was a government policy to give financial reward to military members who presented the bodies of guerilleros killed “in battle.” It was subsequently revealed that many military officers had kidnapped poor rural non-combatants, dressed them in guerilla uniforms, killed them, and presented them to administrators, all for financial reward. These “false positives” number 6,402. One of many truths.

The conflicts between the government, guerilleros, narcotráficos, and paramilitaries have contributed to one of the largest human displacements in the world. Sadly, this displacement has not stopped even after a historic 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the largest guerillero group (featured in the documentary I mentioned above). According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, over 300,000 people were displaced within Colombia last year (2024), marking a significant increase over recent years.

Of course, this violence is not evenly distributed throughout the population. Before I left for sabbatical, I had the pleasure of meeting Angela Bohorquez Oviedo, a Colombian political scientist whose doctoral research explored a campaign constructed by “anti-gender activists” during the national plebiscite to ratify the 2016 peace agreement. Angela introduced me to the Gender Subcommittee, which was established during the peace negotiations to attend to the differential impact of internal violence on women and LGBTI people. Her research also exposed how these anti-gender activists—bolstered by US evangelical groups (yet again, US intervention shapes the history of violence in Colombia)—framed the Gender Subcommittee as a threat to traditional Christian family values, ultimately helping to ensure that the plebiscite failed (Colombian president Santos subsequently orchestrated an agreement through other legislative mechanisms, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize).

At la Casa de la Memoria, there is an exhibit explaining the disproportionate amount of violence that trans people faced during the internal conflict, and continue to experience today. In Bogotá, I had the privilege of meeting some of the activists behind Colombia’s Comprehensive Trans Bill (“Ley integral trans”), which was proposed last year. Although the bill did not pass, it did raise public awareness, and I saw stickers in support of the bill throughout the city, not only in queer spaces.

Some of these activists have also worked on an initiative that is much more likely to get approved—the addition of trans-inclusive gender markers on Colombian death certificates. The activists explained that for them, this constitutes a form of epistemic justice; while various statistics are thrown out about life expectancy estimates for trans people in Colombia, they are not based on empirical data.

*The title of this post comes from the song Latinoamérica by Puerto Rican band Calle 13, a stirring song about collective strength in Latin America, in the face of global forms of oppression (including the various US interventions I’ve referenced above). If you haven’t seen or heard it, I highly recommend the music video. Daniel pointed out this lyric which has been playing in my head for the past week: “Un pueblo sin piernas, pero que camina”, a people without legs but who walk. I’m grateful to know them a bit better.

My school took a group of 8 students to volunteer at the Comedor, where we helped serve a free lunch to seniors and got to sit with them and talk. I was a bit hesitant at first—I am generally opposed to poverty tourism and feared this might be a similar excursion—but one of the student volunteers who had been going to the Comedor for months (pictured below) reassured me that this was done in a respectful way. As soon as I arrived, I was thrilled I came. The abuelos and abuelas were undeniably happy to see us. It quickly became apparent that many of them were socially isolated and legitimately welcomed the company and conversation.

Conversation with the abuelos challenged my Spanish skills in a good way. At school, all of my teachers speak with a slow and neutral Bogotano accent. At the Comedor, many seniors come from other regions of the country and bring with them less familiar accents. Also, several were missing teeth, which required me to listen very carefully.

I loved hearing stories from people who had lived in Colombia for 80+ years. I desperately wanted to ask them about politics (I ask everyone I meet what they think of President Petro), but I understood that we were there for a different purpose. I did ask them what had changed in 80 years, and without exception they talked about the lack of violence (at least in Bogotá) since the peace agreement 9 years ago. They asked me why I wasn’t learning French instead of Spanish (many assumed that we speak French throughout Canada). One asked me if I knew any Inuit people.

Las Cruces is a beautiful neighborhood, though the fragile nature of housing is evident from the view atop the comedor (see below). The city of Bogotá classifies neighborhoods into 6 socioeconomic strata: 6 represents the wealthiest neighborhoods, 1 the poorest. Las Cruces is classified in stratum 2. The system was devised to ensure that the wealthiest pay more for utilities like water and garbage, though it remains controversial. One of the more interesting debates is whether the stratification simply exposes a reality that exists in all cities or whether labeling neighborhoods exacerbates the stigma of poverty. I was shocked to learn that I am staying in a stratum 3 neighborhood (I perceive a stark difference between Quinta Camacho, where I am staying, and Las Cruces), and it has me wondering what the stratum 6 neighborhoods look like.

While I wasn’t able to ask the abuelos about Petro, I’ve asked nearly every other Colombian I’ve met. In my informal poll (of more than 30 people), I’ve only met 2 who support Petro. For context: Petro was elected 3 years ago and is considered the first leftist president of Colombia in over 100 years. He is a former member of the M-19 guerillas, which surely didn’t help his electability. Conservatives—whom I’ve only met in Ubers—denounce Petro as full of hot air and generally useless. Leftists complain that his policy reforms haven’t gone far enough. For example, while he brought about labor reforms last year to secure benefits for workers, these benefits only extend to the 50% or so of Colombians who work in the formal economy, with those employed in informal economies earning far less and therefore in greater need of benefits.

I’ve only been here 30 days, but from where I stand, Petro’s Pacto Histórico (the leftist coalition that forms the government) seems like a phenomenal accomplishment. One of my classmates has written about the significance of Petro’s pro-Palestinian stance—not mere rhetoric, but backed by a not inconsequential embargo against Israel. Moreover, it seems to me that the Pacto Histórico leaders are most interested in a long game, building a legitimate opposition to the liberal and conservative parties. It is widely acknowledged that since the National Front (1950s), the liberal and conservative parties have agreed to alternate power-sharing, thereby threatening the ability of other parties or coalitions to gain control (though they have argued that this is a benevolent agreement to ensure peace).

Last Sunday, Pacto Histórico held its primaries, electing Ivan Cepeda to be its next presidential candidate. When I ask Colombians about Cepeda, the outlook is more favorable. His father was killed amidst the intense political violence of the early 1990s. He thus represents a reliable advocate for survivors of Colombian violence. Sunday evening, I set out to meet a new Colombian-Canadian friend for drinks. When I arrived at the bar, I saw a giant sign that read “LEY SECA” (dry law). There is a ban on serving liquor on election days in Colombia; a reminder of the recency of the threat of violence amidst political change here.

My school is fundraising to expand the Casa de Abuelos. If you have the means, please consider making a donation.

Last week, I attended an art exhibit by Bogotá artist María Fernanda Cardoso entitled Arañas del Paraíso (Spiders of Paradise). It was presented as part of Bogotá’s biennial, which was also the occasion for the suspended house I wrote about earlier this month. I’m obsessed with this video of Cardoso, in which she explains that through the exhibit she wanted to encourage humans to pay attention to the tiny peacock spiders by amplifying their images to a human scale. She says they deserve our appreciation for the performance artists they are.

Here are a couple of images from the exhibit:

The peacock spiders in Cardoso’s photographs and films live in Australia, but Colombia is also home to colorful spiders. My favorite is the Colombian purple bloom birdeater. I like it for two reasons: 1) it’s my favorite color; 2) its name implies that it eats birds—and I strongly dislike birds—though apparently that is a misnomer; it mostly feeds on large insects. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish to meet this spider in the wild, but I am happy to admire it from a distance.

At the exhibit, I had a fascinating conversation with a docent. Reflecting on Cardoso’s interest in spiders, I wondered if spiders had a particular importance in Colombian culture, or folklore. I had just read about Anansi, a popular character in Ghanaian folklore—more on that later. The docent told me about the Wayúu people’s traditional story of Walekeru, or the magical spider (the Wayúu are indigenous to northern Colombia and constitute the largest indigenous group in the country today). A brief synopsis: One day, a hunter stumbled upon a little girl, Walekeru, who was covered in dirt, playing with ants. Thinking she was abandoned, the hunter brought her home and took care of her. Once he discovered her talent for weaving extravagant fabrics, he asked to wear these fabrics. She agreed to continue making them, as long as he kept her talent a secret. But the hunter eventually betrays Walekeru, allowing other Wayúu people discover her, at which point she transforms into a spider and flees to the mountains.

I’ve been pleased to find that Indigenous Peoples are justly honored and made visible throughout Bogotá—at least in my experience so far. As in Canada, Indigenous people constitute ~5% of the country’s population here, though as many as half of Colombians are of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry. Indigenous prominence is reflected in various spaces; for example, here are some images from a street art tour I did the other day, in which the guide took care to emphasize and explain at length pieces like these:

Tesoros del bacata depicts a legend of the Muisca (or Chibcha) people concerning the first woman and man to inhabit the earth. The second mural, by Bogotá artist DJLu, represents a Chipe (or Hitnü) leader.

Back to the spiders: all of this spider business probably struck a chord because I recently read Homegoing by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi delicately tells the multi-generational stories of two lineages of Ghanaian people and African Americans, descended from half-sisters born in late 18th century Ghana. It is hands-down the best book I’ve read this year. Gyasi is humble about her accomplishment, but it is truly extraordinary; in this interview, she talks about how the Ghanaian people are proverb-tellers. Throughout the early parts of the novel, Gyasi invokes the stories of Anansi, an Akan character who plays the role of trickster in many Ghanaian folk stories. She specifically cites the story of Anansi and the sleeping bird, in which Anansi tries to be a bird, only to learn that he, in fact, cannot fly. I like this blog’s synopsis because it refers to birds as “haughty,” and I’ve always noticed they tend to have that characteristic.

Side note (thanks for bearing with all my tangents—a side effect of sabbatical thinking): While I was reading Gyasi’s novel, I went down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia reading, starting with Anansi. I was struck by a heading in the Wikipedia page entitled “Relationship between Anansi and Br’er Rabbit.” In addition to having read Br’er Rabbit stories as a kid, I lived in Los Angeles as a teenager and frequently visited Disneyland, where Br’er Rabbit featured prominently in the media surrounding the Splash Mountain ride. I’m ashamed to say I did not understand the depths of cultural appropriation and sanitization of the retelling of Br’er Rabbit folklore through enslaved people until I was 45 years of age.

The Walekuru and Anansi narratives got me thinking about spiders in metaphor. This is close to heart in my professional work. My all-time favorite academic paper is Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider? by my academic hero, Nancy Krieger (1994!). I routinely assign it to my students to understand the pitfalls of atheoretical thinking in epidemiology. In the paper, Krieger uses the spiderweb metaphor to critique models of epidemiology that fail to identify who created the “web of causation.” My crude attempt to summarize this paper is this: sure, race and income are interrelated (in the web of causation), but who created this interrelationship? Krieger demands that we as epidemiologists be more forthright in acknowledging the systems and sources of power that create the webs that relate social (and health) factors.

This past spring, in collaboration with my brilliant colleague Whitney Qualls, we asked epidemiology students to create an end-of-semester representation of what they learned. One student created this art to represent the significance of Krieger’s critique. I was blown away. The detail in the student’s spider reminds me of Cardoso’s artistic intent.

The throughline here is that spiders—in reality and metaphor—are powerful tricksters. Tricksters are mischievous but wise. Cardoso magnified the 5mm peacock spiders to see their power. Krieger also asks that we focus our attention on the sources of power for the webs that represent unequal opportunities for health and wellbeing in our societies. Cardoso notes that spiders are sophisticated; some have suggested that their webs in fact form part of their consciousness. This blows my mind.

A trio of university students approached me while I was staring at the exhibit. They explained that they were digital communications majors and wanted to interview me, on video, to hear what I thought of the suspended house. I am here to improve my Spanish speaking skills, so I try not to turn down any opportunities to practice. I said something about how our lives were uprooted by the insecurity we feel in contemporary times—trite bullshit, but it was what I could manage with my limited Spanish.

At the start of the interview, the interviewer on camera introduced herself and then asked for my name. It was the first time I had introduced myself as TJ, in Spanish. Not knowing Latin American conventions for initialisms, I said “tay”, “jota”—pronouncing the letters T, J in sequence. The student looked at me with a raised eyebrow, and I immediately realized that this form would not work in Spanish. “¿Tu nombre es te jota??” she asked me incredulously. “Tee Jay,” I explained. “Ah, tu nombre es TJ Jota,” she replied. I went with it.

Later in the week, I recounted this story to friends of friends who are Colombian. After a hard laugh, I asked them about initialisms as apodos (nicknames) in Spanish. They don’t exist. Latin Americans will shorten two names to a diminutive nickname, but not as initials! For example, María José will be called Majo, and Juan Manuel may be called Juanma. I love this convention.

We proceeded to devise a good apodo for me to use in Latin America. When I went by Travis, I would often say to hispanohablantes: “Travis como Travieso.” Travieso means mischievous or naughty—usually referring to a child. I told them about how I was going by TJ because of my grandparents, and how the J refers to my maternal grandfather, James. Thus, we landed on the apodo “Jaime Travieso.” Naughty James.

Speaking of affirmed names, I met an incredible woman in Spanish class this week. She was born in Colombia 50 years ago but adopted at 6 weeks old by a US family. Given the current political clusterfuck in my home country, she explored her options for citizenship, identified that she was indeed still a Colombian citizen, obtained her passport, and moved here (despite not knowing how to speak Spanish!). She dislikes her (fairly gringa) given name, and when I told her about my own name journey, she seemed to be inspired to return to her birth name. After all, she is Colombiana! Names can, and should, change to suit our needs and desires.

One other highlight I’ll mention from my time to-date in Colombia was a fruit tasting tour. I had no idea there existed such a rich diversity of fruits. Some of my favorites so far are: granadilla (passionfruit), lulo (which doesn’t have a name in English that I have heard), and pitaya (dragonfruit).

Call me a fruity and naughty TJ.