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Single-Topic Issue In the single-topic issue category, the quarterly has been nominated for its fall issue titled “South America in the 21st Century,” co-edited by Ted Genoways and Daniel Alarcón. Here’s an excerpt from “The Very Edge of the World,” written by Alarcón: We all, to varying degrees, live with the ghosts of our ancestors, but there is nothing quite as stark as digging into the soil beneath you and finding that your neighborhood rests atop a cemetery. How many bodies? Thousands. The way Gato and Florencio described it, the experience sounds like a story the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo might have composed: bodies everywhere, sprouting wild from the soil. When Gato moved to the area, no one had any idea about the burial grounds. Sure, they saw the temple, and the antique walls in the hills, but who could imagine their homes sat above thousands of dead? They just wanted a place to live, free from violence, a place they could call theirs. Then suddenly, you’d be digging to lay the foundation for your home, and they were right there, just below the surface—mummies beneath your feet, everywhere, for blocks around. For people coming from the war zones of the Andes, where bodies buried in shallow graves were neither new nor strange, but terrifyingly common, it must have been especially harrowing. But the first concern, of course, was the land. We knew we had come across something big, Gato said—and that it endangered their claim on the property. People were afraid that the National Institute of Culture might force them to move, and so when the archaeologists came, they decided to negotiate the terms of the dig. Many postponed the construction of their homes while the issue was settled, preferring to live in shacks and lean-tos in the meantime. Now that the two communities have been excavated and cleared, a building boom is on. As we talked, the hammering was constant. On the walk to the house, I’d seen men mixing cement in front of their homes, and strong-backed boys carrying bags of sand along the streets of Túpac. Just the day before, a new road had been inaugurated down in Portales—dark and black, it snaked through the neighborhood, the stinging chemical smell of newly laid asphalt still lingering. Túpac and Portales are, in this manner, two very ordinary neighborhoods on the outskirts of any South American city. Visit them again in a few years, and the changes will be remarkable: houses with two and three stories will dot the area. There will be more paved roads, and restaurants with neon signs, and discos that stay open deep into the night. There will be pharmacies and evangelical churches. There will be internet cafés on every other corner, and the children will chat with their peers in other countries who live in neighborhoods just like theirs. To bear witness to the white-hot pace of this change is to understand just a bit of the drama of South America. No one is quite sure how this will play out, or how these transformations will affect the region’s politics or culture, its environment or economy, but the change is coming, and it can be fearful or hopeful, depending on how you choose to look at it. Gato had cleaned skulls because it was a good job, and because he had to get them out of the way—so he could build. He liked it, he told me, but now it was done, and he and other the residents of Túpac could move on to that project the entire city seems to be engaged in—that ceaseless and optimistic labor of plotting out a better life. Gato couldn’t talk long. He had planned to work after lunch, he said, apologizing. He offered me a ride down the hill in his moto-taxi. His wife had a cart down on the avenue, where she sold candy, cigarettes, and juice. Maybe she could give me something for that cough. I thanked him. Before we all got in the moto-taxi, I asked what it felt like to live on top of a cemetery. Gato shrugged. Florencio cleared his throat. He was a bit of a showman, after all. “What my brother means to say is that we’re all afraid that one day someone will build on top of us.” Photojournalism In the photojournalism category, the quarterly is up for “A Window on Baghdad,” which ran in the summer issue. Photos and words for the piece are by Chris Hondros, here’s an excerpt: Of course, the view from the Humvee window is, for all its intimacy, a limited look at a complex country. Vignettes of street life give a certain understanding of any society, but it’s a superficial, ephemeral one. Americans riding in Humvees and looking out at Iraqis know Iraq society no better than a visitor taking in Manhattan from a tour bus, with some furtive shopping in Times Square, can be said to understand New York. Missing even from months of staring at “Humvee tv” is any real information on why Iraq is the way it is. The view provides few answers though it asks many questions: What are those students learning when they get to school? Is that woman a Sunni or Shia? Who ordered that road crew to repair that street? Who is that woman—a cosmopolitan who speaks French and longs to be free of her bonds, or some wealthy Iraqi man’s third wife? (Perhaps she’s both.) What are those men laughing about; what’s funny to Iraqis nowadays? Where does that electronics seller get all those washing machines, and who buys them? Who put up that recent billboard for a cigarette brand—is Baghdad still considered a fruitful market for cigarette sales, maybe better than ever? I remember just a few weeks after the ouster of Saddam, in April 2003, I was riding around Baghdad in a taxi (we journalists speak of that world as if it were some idyllic nineteenth-century utopia, not the norm in Baghdad merely four years ago). The taxi driver spoke some English, and we chatted about the eventful past month in Iraq. A convoy of Humvees, already getting to be a routine sight, rumbled past, and I noticed the taxi driver followed them closely, his lips pursed in understated awe. What did he think about American Humvees rolling the streets of Baghdad, I asked him. “Hahm-viz? That is the American car? What does that mean?” “Well, nothing. I think it stands for Highly Mobile Multiple Vehicle.” “Hahm-vees.” He blinked. “The American Army, in Baghdad! Never in one million years did I think I would see such a thing. I think I am having dream.” © 2008 Media Life |
