San Juan Province, Argentina: Humor as a minefield

Action
Recently, our friend David invited us on an activist’s holiday to the province of San Juan in Western Argentina, near the border with Chile. David, a Californian living in Rosario, has been organizing against open pit mining in Argentina. Open pit mining basically involves blowing up a mountain, and then passing all the debris through pools of mercury and cyanide-laced water to filter out the valuable metals (gold, silver, etc.). Afterwards, the mountains are gone (along with the glaciers and riverheads that create drinking and agricultural water) and the chemicals flow into the remaining water system. Open-pit mining is now illegal in much of North America, so the mining companies are coming down here, where it's still legal and they don't have to pay taxes or fees for the necessary infrastructure (roads, electricity, water, etc.) thanks to corrupt governments. In this case, Barrick Gold is planning to blow up over 10 mountains in the middle of the Andes and walk away with over $4 billion in profit.

Hoping to persuade Argentines to avoid making the same mistakes the US has, we went to San Juan. We wanted to play with the idea of three North Americans telling locals what to do, so taking a cue from Billionaires for Bush, we formed “North Americans for Environmental Destruction” (for added rhetorical flourish, the acronym in Spanish spelled out the Spanish word for “nothing”). In three towns in the province, we distributed fake money, while shouting out “Bribes! Pay-offs from North Americans!”

David created bills with a doctored image of the US dollar on one-side and information on the other side. The information contrasted Barrick’s expected $4.6 billion in profits with the tax breaks it was receiving, the $8 million/year that was promised to Argentina, and the hundreds of millions of dollars it would cost to clean up the pollution.

People were a bit confused as we handed them the fake money. We opted not to stay 100% in character, but sometimes explained our purpose as we handed out the bills: We were handing out money because that’s what the North American mining company is doing, when they offer money for local development programs. The money they are offering, however, is a pittance compared to the profits that they will make and the negative economic impacts of the pollution.

After receiving a “dollar,” one student came back and asked for more to show her friends. A grocery store owner took a stack to distribute to customers. Another woman, however, accused us of making fun of them. I tried to explain that that wasn’t our intention and that rather we were making fun of ourselves as North Americans. Hugo, a local activist who was hosting us, steered me away, saying dismissively that she was pro-mining.

Reflection
The purpose of our action was to get people to think critically about the mining in the region and question the motives of the mining corporations. By being silly, we hoped to appear less threatening and also catch people off guard.

Several times, people took us at face value and told us that they supported the mining company as well. We usually replied to them by thanking them for supporting our (North Americans’) attempts to profit off them and leave them with pollution. This is similar to the technique that Socrates uses in Plato’s dialogs and that most law professors in the US use as well. That is, they rephrase the argument of their interlocutor and carry the interlocutor’s logic out to its extreme end, to make the interlocutor confront the flaws in her logic. Plato was ultimately executed and many law school professors are reviled.

Why did we think we’d be any different? Because we were being silly.We were hoping that our outrageousness would break people’s thought patterns and give them an opportunity to approach a controversial subject with a fresh mind. David referred to this process as creating a rupture.

Unfortunately, humor is often in the eyes of the beholder. Though we knew our intent was to mock ourselves and engage in a dialog with the people of San Juan, that wasn’t always clear to the people we were engaging with.

Question
When does humor create a rupture and when does it mock? Have you ever changed your mind about something thanks to the use of humor?

Rosario, Argentina: Can you believe they put a man on the moon?

Action
After viewing a museum exhibit of the iconic image of the first steps on the moon by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, our guide turned to us and said, “Llegó o no llegó?” Josh and I looked at him blankly. He repeated his question. We repeated our blank stares. We understood the words he was using, “Did he or didn’t he arrive?” but we just couldn’t figure out what he was referring to. Finally, another museum guide came along and explained that there’s some skepticism as to whether people actually did land on the moon. Perhaps it was just a production filmed by Stanley Kubrick, suggested the first guide. He argued that the way the astronauts walked and the flag waved weren’t consistent with a zero-gravity environment.

A couple of weeks later, I was on a bus and began chatting with the young man sitting next to me. After discussing cultural and political differences between the US and Argentina, he asked me if I thought Osama Bin Laden really existed. When I asked him about man landing on the moon, he also confessed to being a skeptic. Josh later told me the young man had offered him a beer (at 8 in the morning), so maybe he was not the most clearheaded fellow.

Cora, a friend of ours, once explained to me that Argentines question everything because of their rocky history. Argentina was ruled by a military dictatorship from 1976-1983. In the financial crash of December 2001, when Argentina went through five presidents in a week, Argentines learned that having elected leaders wasn’t the magical solution to their economic and political problems. According to Cora, they’re still trying to figure out how to improve their democracy.

During one of our classes, Mirta, a language student of mine, brought up Argentine skepticism. She said that Argentines question what they hear and evaluate it by discussing issues, reading further and listening to radio and TV programs. “Maybe North Americans don’t do this so much because they are more secure,” she offered.

Reflection
If I had to name one difference between the thinking of Argentines I’ve met and North Americans I know, I would point to the skepticism of Argentines. I think Mirta is right that one of the reasons for this difference is the relatively stable economic and political condition many Americans live in. It’s easy for me to be complacent when I have a steady job and can count on a pension. But I imagine if I had lived through a crisis or a series of crises, I would soon learn to question whatever system I was in. How could I be sure that the current economic or political model would allow me to live comfortably in the future if I wasn’t even living comfortably now?

I believe that humans landing on the moon is questioned here especially because Americans, a.k.a. “Yanquis,” are the ones who claim to have landed on the moon. While the museum guide might have questioned us just to egg us on, I think it’s also the result of suspicion of people and entities who have power. Given the extreme things the last Argentine dictatorship did to stay in power, it’s not unreasonable for Argentines to imagine that the US government fabricated the mission to the moon in order to appear to have a space program superior to the Soviet’s. Though I still believe that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, my Argentine friends have succeeded in encouraging me to be a more skeptical reader of newspapers.

Question
When have you doubted a common assumption? What led you to doubt it?

Valparaiso, Chile: Art under the open sky

Action
Like good travelers, we’ve visited quite a few museums in the past several months. Besides the children’s museums in Rosario, one of our favorites was the Museo al Cielo Abierto (Open Air Museum) in Valparaiso. The museum’s premise is simple: display art outside in the city, under the open sky.

We “entered” the museum by walking up an alley onto Bellavista Hill. At the top of the hill, scattered along a few streets and passageways, are the museum’s exhibits – large murals by some of the most famous contemporary artists in Chile, painted on the sides of buildings.


Reflection
The Museo al Cielo Abierto was probably the most low-budget museum we’ve visited. It wasn’t enclosed in any building, there was no gift shop, no one was working there, and there was no ticket window at the entrance (since there weren’t actually any tickets or official entrances). In other words, the museum did very little to separate itself from the surrounding neighborhood. The murals were so well integrated into the streetscape that it was often hard to tell where the works of art began and ended.

Which I assume is one of the points of the museum – to challenge the division between art (generally confined to museums) and our everyday surroundings (generally not considered artistic spaces). It’s probably not just a coincidence then that many of the buildings near and around the museum had been painted with an array of vibrant colors. These buildings were just ordinary homes outside of the museum, but does that mean that they’re not art?


Question
What are your favorite museums, and why? What are other examples of museums integrating with the surrounding community? When have you seen art outside of museums?