¡represa ni cagando!

Oh my! How many things have occured in the past days. I suppose it´s easiest to just go chronologically.
So, let´s begin back in Rancagua. The festival was great. We played in a huge bar in the downtown just blocks from the central plaza where national hero Bernardo O´Higgins hid in a church from the Spaniards during the war for independence. The show went great. I did a half hour set with banjo and guitar preceded and followed by covers of Violeta Parra, zambas from Argentina, and a paya, which is a traditional musical poetry slam of sorts. Two payadores, a guitarrist, and a crazy harpist who came from Santiago and entertained us all weekend, faced off improvising whitty rhymes to insult each other in decima form. The place was super loud and it was strange to play with amplification, but people seemed interested in the tunes I played.
Anyway, so after days in Rancagua of copious music and cazuela (stew with meat, butternut squash, whole ears of corn, and hot peppers), I said goodbye to Javi and Daniela and headed north to Quillota to stay with my friend Catalina, who I met in el Bolson. Cata lives with her family in a huge beautiful adobe house in a valley where avocado plantations climb up the hills. She´s taking advantage of her parents land to do all sorts of permaculture projects. Right now, the focus is the building of an Eco-School in the backyard with adobe and recycled bottles, and each weekend friends come from Valparaiso and Santiago to help. Wonderful youngins, all of them. Sunday was spent singing endless songs around the dinner table. The last week, in that sense, has been pretty cushy. I did a lot of work planting trees and cutting planks and such, but I´ve really felt like the gardener in a colonial mansion, surrounded by abundant fruit trees: grapes, apples, caqui, figs, feijao, . . . ahhh! At the same time, I´ve had a cold for most of the week and the endless noseblowing has put a bit of a amper on things, but with all the fruit and crunchy food and medicinal herbs, it´s the best place I could choose to get sick.
Then things got really interesting yesterday. I went to visit my friend Federico in Valparaiso, the San Francisco of South America. Fede has been living there the last few in different squatter houses and giving permaculture classes, studying pirate radio techniques, and selling empanadas in the street to save up money to travel to Brazil to study with Via Campesina. Anyway, he gave me the address of the house where he´s living with three other anarquist types and the password "arriba!" to yell, and I actually found it and there he was in the window. The house was in decent shape considering it had been long abandoned. Four stories, a solid roof, and they´d set up hoses to tap into the neighbors water line and electricity. We had lunch and mate there and went to another anarquist center where we co-taught a class on companion planting. I was pretty out of it at that point with my cold and the smoggy misty air that rises up from the bay into the ramshackle neighborhoods on the hills of the city. But we finished early so we could make it to a protest in the main avenue in front of congress against the approval of a hydroelectric dam (just another of many such projects) to be built by a British multinational in Patagonia which would flood many people´homes, destroy a beautiful river, and all in the name of supplying power to the dirty mining industry in the north. Bullshit!!
Anyway, we come down into the downtown in fornt of congress and what do we see. Pacos pacos pacos!! ("paco" is the derogatory term for the repressive Chilean police). Hundreds of protesters came marching down the main street singing and playing drums and chanting against the dam and here come the pacos with trucks shooting water cannons and tear gas. Some punk types throw rocks at the officers and scream insults. We retreated a bit to get around the police and get back to join the main group of peaceful marchers, but we ended up in the middle of the all too well known game of cat and mouse between the remaining protesters (mostly university kids) and the pacos. We disperse, regroup and start chanting again, then here come the water cannons, so everyone runs and then regroups. Not that anyone was in serious danger of harm, but nonetheless, we decided to get out of the action since it seem like the protest had lost its steam. We visited another big occupied house where some 20 or more squatters have a community kitchen and circus space in a huge building near the docks. We returned later to the plaza where people had regrouped and were playing music and dancing and chanting. At this point, with the protest no longer blocking traffic, the pacos where satisfied simply parked observing and filming the protest. We decided to head out and a friend of Fede, a sociology student, invited us to eat and we ended up staying up half the night eating and talking about the revolution and so forth. Good thing she didn´t have to get up early for class the next day since the whole sociology department is on strike for cheaper tuition.
Uff, so with my cold irritated, but my mind full of thoughts, I returned to the quiet country estate with Cata and family.
Oh, and add this to those thoughts: today I found out I got the Fulbright to spend the next year in Colombia! Holy crap! Didn`t see that coming! So now there´s lots of readjusting of plans and preparing to do. For now, I´m going to hang out and work here for another week while I figure those plans out.
Whew! And that´s all she wrote.