There is exactly one week left in the agonizingly-long wait for the start of my study abroad program in Valpara\u00edso, Chile, where I will be attending SIT\u2019s Cultural Identity, Social Justice, and Community Development program. As someone who prefers to be continually busy, I have found this long break leading up to my departure unsettling, as the ample free time has allowed the nerves of traveling and being away from my friends, family, and home for so long to fester into all the \u2018what-ifs\u2019 and worst-case scenarios. However, the break has also given me the time to ready myself for my trip and reflect on the historical social and political implications of my time in Chile.<\/p>\n
Initially, much of my focus was concerned with the impending language barrier I would soon be facing, as I am living and learning in a Spanish-speaking country for three months, staying with a homestay family and taking courses in politics and economics taught solely in Spanish.<\/p>\n
Yet as I completed my pre-departure reading, I began to reflect more on the gravity and weight of the content I would be studying while in Chile, as my program focuses on the economic, political, and social effects of the military coup and 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. During this period, thousands of opponents, dissenters, and pobladores (poor Chileans who widely supported the preceding socialist and democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende) were killed or \u201cdisappeared.\u201d Following this tragic history, Chile remains still a vastly divided and polarized nation, as individuals hold widely-differing perceptions of Pinochet and his policies. The post-dictatorship governments\u2019 failure to breach this ideological divide has resulted in rising political apathy and discontent.<\/p>\n
As SIT focuses on experiential learning, talking with and learning from individuals who have \u2013 and still are \u2013 suffering from these political events will be emotionally strenuous. Yet to be able to participate in this program at all is an enormous privilege, one I am continually aware of as I grapple with the role my own country, the US, played in supporting Pinochet\u2019s military coup and in triggering still-lingering democratic unrest and instability. In the early 70s, the US chose to overthrow a democratically-elected individual \u2013 Salvador Allende \u2013 and to ignore clear and obvious evidence of human rights abuses under Pinochet\u2019s regime in order to serve its own foreign relations agenda, namely the enforcement and maintenance of global capitalism in the midst of the Cold War.<\/p>\n
While the careless pursuit of self-interest is not new to the US\u2019s foreign policy, I am constantly wary of continuing this pattern of imperialism in my own learning and visits in Chile, especially as we work with historically-marginalized or excluded groups, and will seek ways to avoid simply using or victimizing others or their experiences for my own educational gain. In gratitude for the contributions of these individuals, I have promised myself that during my independent research or internship at the end of the semester I will make use this knowledge to give back to the very communities I\u2019ve learned from, hopefully aiding in the fight to make real social change.<\/p>\n
Hasta la pr\u00f3xima vez,<\/p>\n
Kenzie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is exactly one week left in the agonizingly-long wait for the start of my study abroad program in Valpara\u00edso, Chile, where I will be attending SIT\u2019s Cultural Identity, Social Justice, and Community Development program. As someone who prefers to be continually busy, I have found this long break leading up to my departure unsettling,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":296,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/296"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14101,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10678\/revisions\/14101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}