According to my mother, Doña Catalina de los Rios Lisperguer, was known as La Quintrala because her hair was red as the flowers of “quintral”, a kind of mistletoe that grows in Chiloe. According to historians, la Quintrala was born around 1604. Her origin was Spanish and German. She inherited the lands of her rich […]
Like anybody coming from a farm or small town, Clarita, upon arriving in Santiago, wanted to live in a neighborhood near downtown. But Floro’s apartment was in the Mapocho neighborhood. It was a joy for Filomena to visit the nearby historic Mercado Central (Central Market). She delighted in admiring the handmade pieces of art and […]
While I was teaching at the University of the North in Antofagasta in the North of Chile, I had the opportunity to learn about the American companies that have exploited the copper mines in Chile, practically since the beginning of the century. In 1922, Anaconda Copper Mining Company bought mining operations in Chile. The mine […]
In 1967 I learned through TV and comments in my dorm that Martin Luther King, Jr. was going to Atlanta, GA on August 16, 1967. There he gave is famous speech: “Where Do We Go From Here? I was quite surprised when I received a call from the radio station I had worked for in […]
During the time I spent in Georgia I was really naive about many things. One was racial discrimination. At that time we did not have blacks in Chile and our discrimination was not based on race but on last names and social classes. I realized that in 1967 we were only about 150 foreign students […]
The last semester, I could not find a course to fit with the two required ones, so I ended up taking an unexpected subject, criminology. I learned about Cesare Lombroso’s theories that matched facial features to identify different kinds of criminals. Lombroso, considered by some as the father of criminology, believed that criminality was hereditary. […]
Once in Vermont at the Baptist Church, we were taken to a house which was set up for retreats. Boys were placed in a big room full of beds and girls in another similar one. They had showers like the ones in my dorm in Georgia–one after the other separated by walls and only a […]
That winter during the break, I joined a group of foreign students who were invited by a Baptist Church in Vermont to visit Dartmouth College. We could stay at the church which had a big dorm facility. I took a Greyhound bus. Since I had the time, I had the opportunity to see New York […]
In spite of my chopped English, I did well with my grades. At the end of the first semester I was offered another semester of studies so I could obtain my Master. To my surprise it seems that some of the studies I had done in Chile were equivalent to courses I needed to get […]
As a good Chilean, I had travelled to USA with two 5-liter bottles. One of red and one of white wine. A couple from Puerto Rico that I had met at the cafeteria invited me one afternoon for dinner. They enjoyed laughing at my Castilian Spanish from Chile, and my Andres Bello influenced grammar. At […]
An Ear by Mistake 
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