Someone will ask me if it’s safe there; isn’t it dangerous. And I tell them I experienced real kindness, camaraderie. That I’d see people interact and think we’ve run into old friends of theirs, but to my surprise they’ve just met, and with it a sense of seeing one another that I’d never experienced so completely before.
But what I want to say is that our fear of violence in Latin America often eludes the intergenerational pressure of capital, colonization, and global world-making. Also, this pressure grows—& comes closer to home—as more Americans/westerners “expatriate” and/or poach housing, raising the physical and emotional cost of living for locals who can no longer afford their homes, nor freely enjoy their increasingly gentrified cities.
I was an extended-stay tourist who doesn’t speak Spanish, living in an (airbnb) apartment over 4x local rent. As part of an ongoing neocolonial movement, it’s no wonder why I felt hostility at times.
I hear this is how the world works, that we’re creating more jobs (“stimulating the economy”) and more people are learning english, which creates more “access to opportunity.” And this is sort of true, and it’s sort of true in a world that values capital, and linear notions of progress, more than people. It’s neoliberalism, where the solution to capitalism is more capitalism: work more, spend more, and eventually everyone will be free. It’s a world where we subsume valuable things belonging to others—like ideas, cultures, resources, artifacts, lands, and worlds—while enforcing their indoctrination of our own. It’s ethnocide, ecocide, and, ultimately, genocide, which is obviously violent.
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Edit:
My caveat is that there’s nothing wrong with learning english. And that the global South is entitled to the spoils of capitalism.& There are many good things to come from globalization. Foreign ecosystems require the patience, tolerance, and humility of guests as guests in recognition of a sacred land with boundaries.
