9-11 : One Date - Multiple Tragedies

Mon11Sep2006

9-11 : One Date - Multiple Tragedies

10:35 H | Topics: Chile - History - New York City - Politics

Part of the personal struggle I deal with on 9-11 is the straddling of grief and confronting the egocentrism that is United States culture. In general people in the United States have short term memory. Selectively people remember and claim dates and tragedies as if they belonged to no one else before them. 9-11 is one of those dates.

Five years ago today I was on my way to my job in the financial district of Manhattan, blocks away from the World Trade Center. A man came into the subway at one point yelling something about planes hitting the Twin Towers. As one of a trainful of jaded New Yorkers, I ignored him. As long as the subways were still running , nothing was really wrong.

Minutes later as my train approached Canal Street and the conductor announced that the train would go no further, something became apparently wrong. While underground it was unclear the extent of what was happening above. I called my mother, who worked in one of the World Trade Center towers and no one answered. I soon was trapped for hours in a dark smoke filled subway car as the Twin Towers collapsed above me, as my mother watched bodies falling from those buildings and she ran for safety. For hours she thought I was dead. For hours I thought she was dead. Between us we lost collegues but not each other. We both walked from downtown Manhattan back home to Queens.

But 9-11-01 wasn't my first 9-11 and it wasn't the world's either. 10 years ago I didn't stayed holed up in a Providencia, Santiago de Chile apartment I shared with gringo college students. I went to the Universidad de Chile to remember what happened on 9-11-73, when democratically elected Socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet backed by the good ole U.S. of A.

My children, half Chilean, half Puerto Rican (which by default means United States citizens) carry these multiple tragedies in their blood line. My partner woke up this morning to watch not the numerous memorials on U.S. network television but to watch the commemoration of another fireball that was the Moneda palace. On 9-11, in different years, different buildings were on fire in different countries. Both led to secret prisons, summary arrests, murder and disapearances. Both remain linked forever by the same politics.

Image Via / BBC Mundo