Share

Rediscovering the Chile – California Connection

By Benjamin Russell

Should the Golden State thank Chile for it's agricultural preeminence? A review of "Strangers on Familiar Soil"

Paperback, 336 pages

Californians are breezily indifferent to their own history. The narrative of the future, not the past, fuels their state’s fixation with the ephemeral — with youth, beauty, fortune, fame. California is thus a place where origins are lost or discarded, and often reinvented. It’s no coincidence that we know screen actors by the names they gifted themselves only after arriving in Hollywood.

In a sharp and thorough work of historical scholarship, Amherst College professor Edward Dallam Melillo attempts to unearth — and make sense of — one of...

Read this article on the Americas Quarterly website. | Subscribe to AQ.

Related

When Latin America Took the “Talking Cure”

An exhibition in London traces the history of psychoanalysis in the region, from dream-interpreting radio shows to Freud’s Peruvian connection.

A Son of Mexico’s Elite Bids for Literary Stardom in the U.S.

In Nicolás Medina Mora’s debut novel, a failed attempt at Americanization yields critical reflections on two North American elites.

Explore