“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” - John Steinbeck
So why would I begin a page about Valparaiso, Chile with a quote by an American writer about his hometown in California? Seems odd, right? Well I was in this town for an afternoon and then again late that night 25 years ago. My memory is faded but the images that still appear in my head are mystical, as if some of the thresholds I passed could have been three hundred years ago in another colonial era. As if I may have witnessed a harbor still filled with fisherman from the pre-Panama Canal days. Like I was observing, in the current moment, the cobble stone streets, the banking district buildings, the restaurants, hotels, the shacks hanging on the hillside pulsing with the influx of copper blood from the Atacama.
I wondered, this time around, if at any moment, standing in a funicular, gazing over the harbor bustling with naval ships with Chilean flags, if I might turn and glance into the eyes of Pablo Neruda or some other leftist poet of more rugged regard. And that poet may look into my soul and question if I can be trusted because their daily life as an agitator necessitated the readiness to flee the country of their heart and soul to save their own life and also, in disappearing by flight, they may confuse and taunt the powerful while inspiring the masses and by that they may also keep the movement alive.
I was told many things about Valparaiso, both before I went and while I was there:
Be careful
It is the sister city of San Francisco
Don’t go in the wrong neighborhood
It’s a disgusting, trashy place
The street art is amazing
It used to be more prosperous, but then the Panama Canal was built, and then another deepwater port was dredged just up the coast
Viña Del Mar is nicer
All the street art is funded by property owners so that their walls are not tagged by “nonsense” graffiti
The place can’t not remind me of another leftist radical writer I admire who comes from the Pacific coast of my own country. The characters of this shanty town, on a hillside feel so much like Steinbeck’s cast of characters of Monterey, California. And so, the best way I can sum up my feelings on Valparaiso are from a Steinbeck quote about his hometown:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”
