What's the Difference?

What's the Difference?

Many friends, both Chilean and Estadounidense, have asked me what is the difference between our countries. At times I respond by saying I sometimes forget I am in a foreign country, that it's not as exotic or extreme as I thought it might be. Of course, I live in Las Condes, a part of town that perhaps prides itself on being more like mainstream US culture than other parts of its own country.

Part of what is different, though, is the visibility of the informal economy, the multitude of vendors selling things in the streets, at the toll plazas, stop lights, and on the buses – anywhere that there is a flow of new possible customers. In the more 'scenic' towns and markets, vendors with tax-id numbers sell pottery, or woven hats; but most just sit for entire days with a blanket display of combs, plastic keychain decorations, obsolete technological artifacts and cheap new sunglasses. Farmers sit outside of the supermarkets with the same fruit that's inside, but in slightly better shape; although I can never quite figure out which is cheaper.

But that will change, soon, at least in the case of the buses.

There is a type of traveler that has been written of, the one who ruins your dreams of traveling by saying, with a sad and farr-off tone, when you mention a place you hope to visit soon, "Ah yes...if only you could have seen it before..." followed by some change that has forever spoiled that precious place, such that your experience, were you to venture there, would never compare to theirs, in its more pure state.

In a twist on this type, I find myself in the enviable position of being on the other side of that line, having seen Santiago before "The Change", the moment when the chaos and clutter of the ubiquitous yellow buses, the Micros, with their diesel smoke (or perhaps parrafin, alcohol, or anything cheap that burns) belching from barely muffled engines; without catalytic convertors (no matter how much they are labeled "eco-catalytic"), brakes screaching as they jerk across the lane to pick up a passenger, or drop one off, in either case barely coming to a stop before slamming into gear again and power-shifting their 8-ball, gold acrylic globe embalming dice, chrome and pearl gear-shift knobs through the chases, the fever pitch of fourth gear a prayer for a lube job and a day off- that day, when they were replaced with clean, efficient, environmentally sound buses, with trained drivers with set salaries and routes and schedules. Every thing set, well ordered, and modern.

There is a part of me that will miss the Micros as they are now; sometimes in the evening, for example, rolling up from la Pintana on Avenida Santa Rosa, back to the city center, with a black light turning white purple and pulling the exotic from every color; salsa music bouncing off of twenty round mirrors festooned with gold fringe; the driver's son (or girlfriend) sitting sideways on the transmission case, helping make change. I will miss the vendors, sweating through the Santiago summer jumping on and off the buses, calling out, in a strange flat drone "helados, helados – manzana, chirimoya, pina, helados, bebidas, helados..." Or selling band-aids; playing guitar and singing a romantic song; girls no more than 14 with their faces painted doing a comedy routine at midnight (although I must admit I have never once given any of them a peso. Does that make me a hard-hearted person?).

I wonder where they will go, the men thin – too thin – and darkly tanned; the women who begin telling their tale of woe with a tone as if they don't expect anyone to actually listen. The girls with face paint perhaps will change into make up, and instead of jumping on and off of buses smiling and laughing, stand on a corner, or sit on the stoop of a store closed for the evening, waiting for a job to come to them.

I will not miss the smoke and the noise, the unpredictability, buses that refuse to stop even as you wave your arms furiously; waiting thirty minutes for a bus and then seeing five in a row, still unsure of which will get you closest to where you are trying to go.

What I will miss is that this is part what is different. It may be inferior in a way to the system that will replace it, but the informal economy it allows expresses life in a way that the increasingly 'efficient' formal economy – with swipe cards, colorless receipts, and drivers whose hands you don't have to brush with yours – can never quite equal. Can we have progress without loosing what makes a place unique? Is progress always part of a trajectory of convergence on the banal? Will the need to sell something to stay alive emerge in new and creative ways? Will the increased efficiency create new ancillary jobs, ones that perhaps even pay better, are safer, or more enjoyable?

In the new economy, will they find jobs as paper-pushers? Or is the consolidated economy a bit thinner overall, on into which some people just don't fit?

Perhaps this is the question, of friction in transition, of how to make things better without some coming out worse. Nothing in history has happened without some waste. Are we wasting any better with time? I wonder if there will be job training, a sort of human 're-tooling', something to get the vendors into schools, or new jobs. Or will they just shift their location, from the buses to the curbsides that serve like cell walls, defining a permeable border to the movement of economic nutrients from the flow of traffic to the production/consumption centers of buildings. Are the vendors serving as symbotic (or perhaps parasitic) taggers-on, or more neutrally perhaps, like barnacles on the lips of whales.

Borderline employment exists everywhere, in the US as well; like trophic levels in nature. One of the cynical reasons I don't give them money is that I don't want to encourage them to continue; I want them to give up on the bottom-feeding and find a better way, one that makes them more a part of my world. If they did, how would I support that? The likely hood is that they already tried, and gave up.