Winter 2021 Spanish Language Reading Group

In the early 1960s, a group of German immigrants settled in a village in inland Chile and founded Colonia Dignidad. For decades they presented themselves as an idyllic agricultural commune, until the testimony of certain runaway colonists revealed the horrors experienced within their walls. The colony’s founder, former Nazi medic and officer Paul Schäfer, systematically abused the boys and girls living there and collaborated with the Pinochet regime, placing the colony at its disposal for arms trafficking and as a torture centre for dissidents. After conducting a lengthy investigation and interviewing numerous colonists who survived these horrors, Chilean writer Lola Larra tells the story of the colony, starting with the mysterious death of a young boy.

The narrator of Los pasajes comunes left the housing complex of his childhood many years ago, but disturbing memories of a crisis-ridden adolescence return to him like apparitions. It’s as if, in a distant galaxy, Sami and Lucas are still throwing stones from the rooftop, police cars are still burning, gunshots still ringing, and a trickle of blood runs forever down the elevator shaft. In Gonzalo Baz’s debut novel, the shared space of the flats becomes a labyrinth from which it is impossible to escape.

La compañía is an experimental work about Nuevo Mercurio, Zacatecas: a former mercury mining town in northern Mexico, where mining activities have led to serious levels of pollution. This is a book which defies classification. It includes photographs, diagrams, testimonies, reports and interviews, as well as a reworked version of a short story by Amparo Dávila and elements from the work of visual artist Manuel Felguérez. In examining how the abandoned, ruined mine haunts local collective memory, this work strives to reveal the psychological, environmental and social consequences of extractivist economies.