Case studies | 4. El que toma Mate y bebe Caña no vuelve a España
“Immigrants can not escape their history any more than one can escape one’s shadow.”
Zadie Smith
The fourth object in the collection is the second oldest, but the one that I consider to have the most significance, not only for its owner, but also for the family and its history. This mate made of worn silver and wood that has lost its original color, 9 cm high, 22 cm in circumference and weighing approximately 93 grams, was a gift given to my grandmother on her 20th birthday from the school “La Santa Unión de los Sagrados Corazones” in Junín, Argentina in 1975.
Although the moment she received the mate is a concrete memory, there are several events she experienced that come to the surface when she sees this object. That is why when asked what is the first thing she feels when she sees it she says: “memories, longing”. These memories involve her family of 13 who lived in Santander and the journey they decided to undertake in 1948 by ship around the continent to live in Argentina. When asked the reasons behind the trip she could not say a specific reason, she recalls that her father was concerned about the growing violence in the country and also “he also liked to travel and it served because everything we traveled was a school, in the end we were very much rigged to where we ended up arriving”.
The growing violence they experienced since the family was founded in 1925, begins with the bipartisan violence that had been affecting the country since the 1920s. Estepa (1992) explains how Colombia is a country of regions that has undergone a particular process of economic-social development, and that is why there was no idea of nationhood. Santander in particular lived through a very hard period due to the confrontations between liberals and conservatives. Escobar (2021) relates the way in which the liberal police killed conservative peasants and how this fact originated the “chusmas”, groups of attack and defense, which would end up causing continuous massacres as the liberals or conservatives came to power and used it against their adversaries.
The family was, in general, of conservative affiliation, with the exception of the eldest son who preferred to be a liberal and as a student was taken in as Jorge Eliécer Gaitán’s “godson”, reason for which he ended up being expelled from the home by his father. The history of my family, as told by my grandmother, can also be read in the book written by one of my grandmother’s brothers in which he narrates not only the history of the family name, but also the arrival of his grandparents to Santander and what they lived until each of the 11 brothers made their own family. In this book there are fragments that tell how they had to live a life under a lot of pressure to see what was happening around them because of the bipartisan violence, until April 9, 1948, when “El Bogotazo” occurred, a time when my grandmother was 16 years old and remembers:
“That was a Friday at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, everyone went to close everything, to close the school, to take the nuns out of the convents, among those was an aunt, nothing happened to them but they were very scared. Everywhere in Bogota there were problems, they went into the stores, they took out merchandise, they stole food, everything, it was almost impossible to contain it.”
When asked what she saw, she replied that it wasn’t much because she was a boarder at the school, but that they listened to the news and what the parents said when picking up the students, she had to wait until the next day:
“My dad and my brothers came from Nemocón, which is a town far from Bogotá, walking along the road that was straighter, to pick up me, a brother who was in the seminary and another who was in a company.”
When calm returned and the family was together, the idea of leaving the country took shape: “It was not because we were persecuted or because we belonged to an opposing party or anything like that. It was because my father wanted to be in a country that was calmer”. At the end of April of that same year, they sold everything and left by boat to the home they would have for seven years. She remembers how they managed to settle in Junín, in the province of Buenos Aires, thanks to everything that the third of her siblings managed to get by going to Argentina: “Totoño was everyone’s father, he paid for the tickets, found work for the others and for us so that we could continue in school, he would probably deny that he had a lot of work to do”. When asked if they had difficulties in adapting, she replies: “At the beginning? A lot of meat, but we adapted very easily, but at the beginning the meat seemed very fat to us” and also “Oh how ugly they will see us!” This last memory still makes her laugh when she remembers what her mother used to say about Argentineans.
During those seven years several of them finished kindergarten, she finished school and started her studies to become a teacher and even the older brother got married and had a son. All these memories associated with that territory fill the object and even now she still feels a connection with Argentina, even a longing that she shares with her daughter: “Alcirita, when are we going? We have to go there (…) We have to take a little trip, go to Junín where there is a large lagoon that appears from time to time, an eye of the sea”. This feeling of longing was generated by the abandonment of their home, a kind of voluntary exile generated by the social situation they experienced. Following Svetlana Boym: “The main characteristic of exile is a double consciousness, a double exposure to different times and spaces, a constant bifurcation” (Boym, 2002, p. 387, my translation).
This double consciousness and constant bifurcation materialized when the family decided to return to their homeland seven years later because of their sense of belonging, as well as seeing the changes taking place in Argentina:
Perón’s, (…), I remember when we were at the airport in Bogotá saying goodbye to some friends on a trip and just arrived waiting for our flight, when we saw on the news those revolutions that were happening there that did not touch us. But we all wanted to go back (…), one’s nationalism cannot be left aside.
Despite having returned, the memories they constructed during their time in Argentina are still present even 68 years after the trip. As Halbwachs (1997) comments, memory is social and is constructed in relation to a particular group and place, which is why the Mate, which now rests in the display case of the room along with other objects, functions as a material reminder of those moments and its symbolic value is based on its capacity to evoke them.
