Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity

Since the mid-nineteenth century, millions of people have migrated to Latin America, choosing to endure multiple losses in the anticipation that life in the ‘New World’ would offer a positive alternative to the limited opportunities in their countries of origin. Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral captures the complex but essentially optimistic essence of this kind of migration:

However, in the past several decades, another migration has taken place as hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been forced from their homelands into exile in a flight from the terrors of political repression. Exile is a specific kind of migration, without yearning and shorn of hope and aspiration. Refugees are journeying from, not toward, something, and what they leave behind nags at the psyche, wedding it to the past. My city - Los Angeles - is a city of exiles, where since the late seventies large numbers of Central Americans have been forced into a continual exodus from civil war and military dictatorship. They bring with them a legacy of social trauma that infuses their experience of arrival in the United States with a profound pessimism about the past and about what lies ahead in the uncharted future. Exiled poet Etelvina Astrada describes the conditions that have driven her and other refugees from their countries: