Launch of the book “Iconoclastas” by Francisca Palma
- House Workshop Theater South, Maipú 353, Yungay Neighborhood.
- May 31 – 7:00 p.m..
A few days before that May 21, at some point in the early 2000s, the authorities of Alto Hospicio are desperate: the bust of Arturo Prat in front of which students, mothers’ centers, bodies of firefighters, social organizations and even buses in cars pushed by their kindergarten teachers.
This is the setting where the story of “Iconoclastas” (Editorial Navaja, 2024) is set, a novel by the writer and journalist Francisca Palma (1989) that questions the way in which the Nation State has been promoted and installed in an area. extreme as is the Tarapacá region, where she herself grew up.
In “Iconoclastas” three voices coexist: Michael Mamani, a student of Aymara descent who has always been bothered for this, to the point of calling him “countryman”; his grandmother Graciela, who came to Alto Hospicio from Enquelga – a town in the Tarapacá highlands – in search of job opportunities after the process called the Chileanization of Tarapacá; and Manríquez, a classmate of Michael’s with whom he shares the bus to return from high school. Since his surnames are next on the list, they have to do school work together in their last year of high school at a Catholic high school.
After a first launch in Iquique on May 10, the book will be presented in Santiago this Friday the 31st by the writers Arelis Uribe and Daniela Catrileo, in an event that will take place at 7:00 p.m. at Casa Taller Teatro Sur (Maipú 353 , Yungay neighborhood). The author will also launch the fanzine “La Huerta”, from the nascent Blueditorial project.
narrate the north
When he published “Iquique Glorioso. Chronicles of the Land of Champions” (Ediciones Radio Universidad de Chile, 2016), Palma had already been working for a year on the idea of “Iconoclastas”, a fictional story that was born from an urban myth that his brother five years older told him: there existed the rumor that the bust of Prat had once been stolen.
Much of the journalistic and historical research work that he carried out to prepare that first book of chronicles about the northern city – which was his thesis as a journalist at the University of Chile – went into this novel. It addresses, for example, the Chileanization of the Tarapacá Region and the work of the geographer Freddy Taberna, who was assassinated by the dictatorship, whose development plan for the towns of the interior proposed – among other things – integrating them into the process of Popular Unity, and that they could live and develop in their original land. The explosion of the Carlos Cardoen arms factory also appears, which occurred in 1986.
“I was afraid that it would be taken as an anecdote, but I also think it is good that it is a cultural anecdote, because there are people who have no way of imagining it. It’s what my generation saw, because that parade that I describe – where centers of mothers and babies parade in cars – I saw it. It was absurd, but also very folkloric. The idea was not to romanticize it either, but to make visible that this really happened and for everyone it was fine, and it still happens: the morning of the launch in Iquique, my brother sent me a video of my nephew parading. We continue in the same way, it is a very militarized imaginary,” says the author.
Although he migrated to Santiago to study Journalism at the University of Chile, Palma continues to place his narrative voice in the north. “It is a place that continues to be many things at the same time and that has enormous cultural potential. I think there is a very rich scenario of cultural disputes to imagine. Each place is worth narrating, but the regions especially have a particular value, and this is an extreme region, a poor region, a region that ‘does not matter’ in the social imagination. This book tries to say that there is more to it than that. That ‘something’ may not necessarily be better, but it is much more,” she explains.
Francisca Palma is currently writing a compendium of stories about the north and a collection of poems about the desert. Additionally, the author works on a textile art project called “Embroidery of an open wound,” where she portrays the faces of the girls and women victims of Alto Hospicio with strands of female hair; work that was presented in its state of process at the First Festival of Contemporary Art of Tarapacá (RUCO), in February 2021.