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While many North Americans are familiar with South America through traveling or lineage or other means, the majority, it seems, view it as nothing more than a reflection of a surface name. And it’s not only the complex history of that distant continent that feels so, well, distant. What is its current identity? What in the world does "South America in the 21st century" mean?
How many quarters are there in a year? C-VILLE takes on the Virginia Quarterly Review. From cover to cover. Again!
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That’s what’s emblazoned in red letters across the cover of the new Virginia Quarterly Review, and it’s a comfort to know that this empty phrase is backed up with 322 pages of a special issue on the subject (a nice break, by the way, from the journal’s usual dizzying eclecticism—rewarding though it is). The issue, co-edited by VQR helmsman Ted Genoways and Peruvian journalist and fiction writer Daniel Alarcón, has 17 contributors, and the focus of the pieces ranges from an enduring symbol of poverty in Buenos Aires, Argentina, called the White Train, to a nonfiction love story originating in a neighborhood in Lima, Peru, to a 2002 anti-Hugo Chávez protest in Venezuela that turned deadly, to the connection among soccer, Holland and the tiny country, Suriname, to a "mysterious albino town" in Argentina, as well as work by an Argentinean cartoonist and two fiction selections.
Readers who get through every page won’t end up graced with a manageable understanding of contemporary South America. Rather, seemingly countless details will continue to thrash and churn in their brains, along with a realization: The cultural and political panorama of North America, though different in significant ways from its counterpart, is just as sprawling and untameable. South America will become not just a mysterious continent, but a mysterious, sister continent.
And if such a wide approach is too hot to handle, immersion in any single piece is a way to cool and calm down. Julio Villanueva Chang’s profile of the former blind mayor of Cali, Colombia, who came "under suspicion for crimes he claims he never saw," is evidence of the almost mythical reality that pervades South America. Peruvian-born artist Ana de Orbegoso’s images of saints with their faces replaced by the faces of Peruvian women of today and Hwa Goh’s photographs of Inca descendants work as visual tools to chip away at the essence of the continent. "Soy in the Amazon," by Californian Pat Joseph is far more fascinating and trenchant than it appears. And finally, Marjorie Agosin’s series of poems, while not as graceful as her famous countryman Pablo Neruda’s, get at the bare bones—literally and figuratively—behind recent Chilean politics.