The next president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, will live in a mansion on Huérfanos, between Libertad and Esperanza. These streets of the Yungay heritage neighborhood, with a glorious past and a rusty present in the center of Santiago, they are a reflection of a society divided by inequality.
The 500 square meter house that Boric will occupy with his girlfriend and next first lady, Irina Karamanos, It was a hostel, a medical center and had a pizzeria whose name on a sign on the facade no neighbor seems willing to pick up: Sensato.
The references to find the new presidential house are loaded with symbolism for the changes that Chile is facing at the hands of a millennial president, who at 36 years old assumes the challenge of a government that wants to implement reforms before a population that cried out for a new social pact.
East “It is a popular neighborhood, there are people who are dedicated to tattooing, people who are musicians, people who are dedicated to selling on the street, there are foreigners, Chileans, Venezuelans, Colombians, that is, they live the reality of how the country is today”says Felipe Fuentes proudly, a street vendor who will be a neighbor of the President, so he says “expectant, excited.”
Fuentes voted for Boric, like most of the neighborhood. Now they view with suspicion the recent arrival of police officers who are guarding a neighborhood marked by murals and graffiti.
Founded in 1839, Yungay was the first neighborhood in Chile, also the most splendid, where the incipient bourgeoisie that founded the republic settled. Then their descendants emigrated in the 20th century to the east of Santiago, known as the “high neighborhoods”.
Around the middle of the 19th century, some French arrived to work in the fields. That’s where picturesque places like La Peluquería Francesa were born, which opened 154 years ago and has a restaurant next door.
“There are many corners of Yungay that express in some way that they are not disconnected from the social phenomena that are happening now, but they depict it through street art,” says barber Juan Ángel Ibáñez, 67, in a vintage shop. , particularly careful compared to other blocks that expose decades of neglect.
away from the rich
Chile is recognized as a very classist country with great inequalitiessomething that the economic boom of the last 30 years only deepened and that exploded with all its anger in the demonstrations of October 2019.
“El Boris”, as the new leftist president is popularly called, decided to leave an austere apartment in another historic central Santiago neighborhood, Bellas Artes.
After his assumption of power on March 11, Boric will continue to live “from Plaza Italia down”the limit that the locals recognize between the privileges that “those from above have” in that square, the epicenter of the protests.
His new neighborhood has bohemia and identity, but among its cobblestone streets, with traces of an old train, the social mixture that survives due to the lack of policies towards marginalized communities is also perceived.
The neighbors regret having a poor internet connection, night crime and yearn for green areas, nearby schools.
Boric will be 10 minutes by car, 30 minutes walking and two or three metro stations from the presidential palace of La Monedabut far from the wealthy communes in which most of his predecessors inhabited.
“I don’t know if Yungay itself reflects Chile, but Boric’s choice of the Yungay neighborhood does send very clear messages, such as turning his back on careerism a bitto the idea that you had to live in the most luxurious and safest areas of Santiago, ”explains architect Sebastián Gray, director of the Espacio Público study center, to AFP.
The presidential couple will live in an area that “in addition to all its enormous architectural and urban attributes, is today a melting pot of social diversity. The signs in this sense are to be closer to the reality of the country”, he adds.
Several of these mansions are rented by rooms to families of Caribbean and South American immigrants. From time to time they make the news due to fires due to lack of maintenance or overcrowding, and they are a risk when an earthquake shakes the city because its structures are already battered.
Yungay was the first community in Chile to organize itself to protect heritage from the voracious advance of real estate companies that, with the boom of the 1990s and 2000s, swept away other historic areas.
“I think that with this president’s neighbor, little problems in the neighborhood can be solved,” says a neighbor, Gladys Oropeza, a 40-year-old nursing assistant.
The local hope is that this move will improve living conditions beyond Libertad and Esperanza and that Chile will rescue the value of community life. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
