hi natalie,
i was quite away from the blog because the flesh-blood-tools world is being a bit busy.
i agree meals can tels us a lot about migrations and building identities.
at the south of chile we have the delicious ‘curanto’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curanto
, which is a community event that brings people together. I’ve been in a few and the experience was amaizing and both belly and heart very nurturing.
very interesting is the fact that there could be strong relations across the pacific ocean on linking and maybe populating or connecting this part of the globe whit the other side of the pool (i love to think that and i love to think about the south idea). pacific islands has this same way of cooking and sweet potato also… something to go deeper soon.

now, after having the belly full, i would like to be more critical about our social structure and identity here in chile, which is home for me now.
i apologize if the text is a bit messy and unorganized, but i’ll try to do it allright.
we are a post-colonial nation still defining and constructing our own identity.
we have received many immigrations by the time, which has created what i think i am: a mestizo, a mix (which now is not just the clasical aproach native-spanich).
but we haven’t got this races-melting-pot very fairly .
talking about the gray area, and the gray color could be very useful for discuss about it. As mainstream, we chileans tend to think in the cheapest approach to printing: using the draft possibility in black and white. you will understand that soon.
if you ask anyone about the tension of races here, all people tend to say that we are very tolerant and so on.
but we are not. actually, we don’t talk about ‘blackness’ because we are not used to have much african immigration (and obviously it is not polite to say black as race… but we say ‘negrito or negrita’ as a very warm nickname… love paradoxes).
i remember when i was a kid walking with my grandma in downtown and all people was tourning to see to the same direction… it was a black guy walking and all people was pointing out him, just because he has a different skin color. the situation has not improve so much by the time.
now, having chile a quite strong economy and stable politics, a lot of central and south americans are immigrating here. and we are not the most friendly people with immigrants, not event with our closers foreigners. chileans are getting more and more arrogant about how chile is developing overwieing and discriminating specific nationalities us peruvians and bolivians. but in our mental structure we don’t have the classical racist association of ‘black-nigger’ (because the black immigration is very recent here), so because of that we tend to think that we are not racist.
but we are very racist with brownish-skin-people (that is our approach to the anti black racism)… which is very stupid: we are brown all of us! (and we have already a quite dirty races-history).
pretty obvious is the next comment, the mainstream is quite willing to reciev european immigration or to say that we have european blood, better if they have whitish skin (a very used joke is ‘mejorar la raza’ – to improve the race… so the other saying is quite right that ‘entre broma y broma la verdad se asoma’ – between jokes the truth appears).
on the top of that, us a country we have a very unrepresented and discriminated native cultures (we allowed to get cultures exterminated, land robbed, names forgotten, natives exported to human exhibitions, using anti-terrorist laws for put the in jail and so on).
other important immigrations are oriental people in the north (and now in all the country), people from balcans both in the north and south, and germans in the south between many others.
so, for putting easier, we are not just walking the gray area in chile, but we all are gray (or brown)… but we want to be white…. that make sense to anyone? sure it doesn’t.
can the colors-pallete even not be just in the grays scale? can we be proud of the different migrations and respect them as contribution to this work-in-progress-identity?

i would like to tell you a bit more about our wide doble-estandar (double-standards) in a next post.

on the other hand, here is very active now in contemporary art (unfortunately not jewelry yet… but will be soon) with fair Chaco http://www.feriachaco.cl/
and the trienal http://www.trienaldechile.cl/
… at the fair i got very interested on the bolivian, peruvian and colombian galeries that were exhibiting at the feria… and a lot of people get interested on them too……….
could art be a useful tool to get more tolerance, curiosity and fairness for the “amigo cuando es forastero” (the foreigner friend)? or can art reflect the unfair situation and propose new paths of development or presence on the media?
it is a naive aim? i don’t think so.
(i would like to write that in spanish for get it clearer and better, but i rather ask to you your understanding about my basic english skills.)
warmest,
nano