Life in Debt. Clara Han
art and music to WJH, and the late Joan Gillespie for the pretzels and chats. I thank the late Joan Kleinman for her wisdom.
In the first three years of my graduate training, the Friday Morning Seminar led by Byron Good and Mary Jo DelVecchio-Good at Harvard introduced me to a host of mentors, who now live in other places. My deep thanks go to João Biehl for reading so many of my papers, reading texts with me, and for reviewing this manuscript with such wise eyes. Adriana Petryna, Joseph Dumit, and Michael Fischer have been critical teachers and friends from predissertation to manuscript. Angela Garcia, Chris Dole, Duana Fullwiley, and Lisa Stevenson created sparks for thought and friendship throughout this process. Thank you for reading parts of this writing at early and very late stages. I also benefited greatly from conversations with Eduardo Kohn, Diana Allan, Jessica Mulligan, Emily Zeamer, Jeremy Greene, Erica James, Johan Lindquist, Narquis Barak, Josh Breslau, Liz Miller, Aslihan Sanal, and Chris Garces. Ian Whitmarsh generously read and reviewed the entire manuscript and provided critical comments. My warmest thanks to Vincanne Adams who believed in my future in anthropology when I was an undergraduate majoring in molecular biology.
The Johns Hopkins Department of Anthropology provided me with an intensely challenging and creative ethos. I am grateful to Veena Das, whose comments on this manuscript proved to be turning points in my formation. Jane Guyer, too, read parts of the manuscript and provided critical insights and intellectual support. I also thank Deborah Poole, Naveeda Khan, Juan Obarrio, Anand Pandian, Niloofar Haeri, Emma Cervone, and Sidney Mintz for their conversations and insights. I am especially grateful to Aaron Goodfellow, whose modesty would normally prevent me from saying that I have learned a great deal from him. Thanks to Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Randall Packard, Katrin Pahl, Jennifer Culbert, and the late Harry Marks for expanding my thinking and my world at Hopkins. Bhrigupati Singh, Prerna Singh, Isaias Rojas-Perez, and Sylvain Perdigon have become wonderful friends whose intensity of thought made me a better scholar. I am grateful to graduate students Amy Krauss, Nathan Gies, Juan Felipe Moreno, Serra Hakyemez, Patricia Madariaga-Villegas, and Grégoire Hervouet-Zeiber for their engagement. I thank my undergraduate students who engaged with parts of the manuscript for this book in classes, including Precious Fortes, Michael Rogers, Tyler Smith, Dom Burneikis, and Margaret Davidson.
I shared parts of this work over the past several years, including at Princeton's Department of Anthropology and Program in Latin American Studies, when invited by João Biehl and Miguel Centeno; at Harvard's Friday Morning Seminar; at Brown's Department of Anthropology; and at the Pembroke Center's “Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective” seminar, when invited by Kay Warren. I shared it virtually at UC Irvine, and I thank Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff for their comments. I also shared it at several meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and I thank Didier Fassin for his comments on materials presented at the AAA and workshops.
The research for this book was made possible by several generous fellowships: the National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the National Institutes of Mental Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award MD/PhD Fellowship Grant No. 5 F30 MH064979–06, as well as by summer fieldwork grants from Harvard University, including grants from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of Social Medicine's Crichton Fund, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Film Study Center.
I thank Reed Malcolm of the University of California Press for believing in this book and for his enthusiasm, and the reviewers who provided incisive and helpful comments.
Treasuring the complexity of life comes from my family. I thank my dad, Sook-Jong Han, for his stubborn perseverance and intellectual honesty. My mom, Chung Hwa Han, passed away before she could see me graduate from college. I hope she finds that this book speaks to her life-affirming warmth. My siblings made this research and writing existentially possible. I thank my sister, Alyse, treasured soul mate, for making life fun, beautiful, and smart; my twin brother, Andy, for keeping my sense of humor alive and kicking, and my brother Mike for being a solid big brother to a kid sister. I am grateful to Paty, alma gemela, for her love of shared worlds. Finally, I thank my partner, Maarten Ottens—a beautiful, caring, and wise companion. Such a wonder of life and world! With great patience, he listened to every page of this book multiple times. This book is dedicated to you all.
Introduction
We waited. In La Pincoya, the lights were cut to the sector and bonfires crackled on the main street, Recoleta. On September 11, poblaciones (poor urban neighborhoods) commemorate the golpe del estado (the coup d'état) that in 1973 brought down the government of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and ushered in a seventeen-year dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet. It was 2005, and there was euphoria and expectation in the air, the atmosphere both celebratory and tense. Women helped children put garbage—wood, an old armchair, plastic bins—in a bonfire pile to be ignited with paraffin. Neighbors stood outside closed storefronts, greeting one another with a mixture of festivity and fear. People knew what to expect, as one woman said precisely: “At around midnight, the municipality will cut the lights to the sector. An hour later, the police will come up Recoleta [La Pincoya's main street], and then we will protest. And then the police will go up Recoleta [starting from the beginning of the población and moving farther into it], and then we will chase them down, and then they will come up again, and then we will chase them down again.”
A choreographed dance of bullets, tear gas, Molotov cocktails, stones, and water canons was to pass through the stage of Recoleta that night. In anticipation, some young men with covered faces were preparing Molotov cocktails to throw at the police. I was in the street with my comadre Ruby,1 who lived in the sector with her husband, Héctor, a former militant, and their three children. Ruby handed me a cut lemon with salt, a homemade antidote for tear gas. The police were supposed to come up Recoleta, as they usually do, in their armored vehicles with water canons and busloads of special forces. They were supposed to start firing tear gas bombs. Special forces were supposed to get out of the olive green buses and chase adolescents through the narrow passageways and lift the struggling teens into trucks. Women were supposed to throw stones at the police and then run through the passageways, laughing at and fearing the expected violent police response.
That is what happened the year before. In 2004, Ruby and I followed a march led by youths in the Grupos Acción Popular, a popular youth movement that surged during the democratic transition after Pinochet's 1990 handover of power. They held a banner reading, MENOS REPRE, + SALUD Y EDUCACIÓN (Less repression, more health and education). The leaders of the march, faces masked, stopped before the municipal police station and read a speech condemning the government in its perpetuation of the “neoliberal model.” A moment later, headlights from police buses flashed on. The protestors scattered, opening their backpacks to pull out and light Molotov cocktails. Ruby and I ran down a passageway off the main street. An unknown neighbor saw us running and grabbed my arm from the door of a wooden shed.
Through the shed's wooden slats, we watched special forces carry a young man to the green truck. “Los llevan presos sólo para llevarlos no más” (They take them prisoner just to take them, nothing more), a woman whispered to me. Another whispered, “But we are used to it. It has happened for the past thirty years.” Fear was mixed with a sense of the formulaic. Taking leave of the shed, Ruby and I ran farther up the main street to the point where we could observe the fighting between the police and the youths below. The police came up the street, extinguishing the bonfires. Molotov cocktails rained down on the police vehicles, and the vehicles retreated, at which point people returned to the street and threw more garbage, wood—whatever would burn—into piles for new bonfires.
But in 2005, a presidential election year that culminated in the December election of President Michelle Bachelet, the police never came. The flames from the bonfires flickered and drizzled smoke as people ran out of garbage, wood, and old broken furniture to burn. “Ya no vienen” (They're not coming), people repeated over and over again in tones of disappointment. It was as if the commemoration of the golpe could not be realized without the state's show of force. The back-and-forth between the forces of the state and the población provided a structure