From the Río Bravo to the Straits of Magellan, the Great Cemi, riding high astride a condor, has scattered the seeds of the new América across the romantic nations of the continent and the suffering islands of the sea!
José Martí, Nuestra América
The Straits of Magallánes are nowhere and everywhere: the end of the world.
Tour guide, Isla Magdalena
On the shores of the Straits of Magallanes, the land dribbles. Like the glaciers that stood for eons, tierra gradually gives way to the sea. Nestled on its shores is the town of Punta Arenas. I was surprised to be reminded of Minnesota. Walking one-way streets with broad sidewalks, I felt like I could be in Willmar, or Duluth, or any US medium-sized midwestern town platted by Germans and Eastern Europeans. I am not sure what it is: the width of the roads, the layout of the commercial center and outlying neighborhoods, or the plazas, boulevards, and parks. Of course, there is no Strait of Magallanes in the Upper Midwest, but Gichi-gami— Lake Superior—also connects small communities to the world and has its own magic.
The official Eurocentric histories and relationships with Indigenous people are also similar.
Selk’nam, Kawésqar, Yagán, and Aónikenk homeland
Magenalles – the southern tip of what is now known as Chile is the homeland of Indigenous people who built canoes from entire tree trunks, and hunted on land in family groups, traversing these waters and wetlands for thousands of years, The story of their lives, the genocide committed against them by Europeans at the turn of the 20th century, their resistance and continuing resilience, is told in radically different ways in regional museums.
We stayed a block from a Punta Arenas museum inside a Catholic Church and monastery, which, unfortunately, was on the itinerary of every official tour. People who come here to see the swiftly disappearing glaciers and witness hot penguins, also stopped at the church, filing out of heated buses into the musty building to take in yellowed exhibits depicting noble/savage Indigenous people, followed by virtuous portrayals of European missionaries who participated in their genocide.
Walk a couple of miles along the Straits, past the Dream Casino, the commercial port, and the naval base, beyond the park with the Gandhi statue and a startling, golden, locked Buddhist Temple. Turn a corner, and you will come to a large new building with high ceilings and a gate jutting out to the sea. It looks abandoned, but it is open. Inside, two people turn on the lights for us. We are the only visitors. Here, in this cultural center built during the Bachelet years, we learned regional history from Indigenous perspectives—of diverse peoples who interacted for eons, using wooden canoes to create networks of trade and culture, fending off early Spanish colonists, succumbing only when the repeating rifle outshot the bow and arrow.
We visited two other history museums. The one in Puerto Natales offered a jumble of perspectives. It looked like a place where the collection and display process has less to do with the message and more with space and what is donated. Finally, we visited the museum in Povernir, where the word genocide is used without hesitation, and panels on labor movement repression reveal a progressive perspective. Unfortunately, the heat was so high that David felt faint, and we had to leave before we could take it all in. I left desiring a connection to the present community outside of the museum, progenitors of both Indigenous people and working-class European immigrants, who have found ways to be resilient in a barebones economy.
On Porvenir, beaded jewelry and paintings with Selknam designs are sold in the few shops that cater to tourists. Everywhere, Indigenous art and religious symbols, especially the conehead-shaped Selknam spirits, continue to be embraced as emblems of the Magenalles region.
Porvenir is a two-hour boat ride from Punta Arenas. The town reminded me of a US reservation and an abandoned US mining town. The population is small. Fresh food, other than salmon, is hard to come by. Trucks filled with processed stuff rode with us on the ferry to be sold in island restaurants and mini-markets. We walked the four miles from the port to the town, along the quiet road, into the marsh, admiring tiny flowers and flocks of birds of all sizes and colors. We ate empanadas filled with rhubarb, and had salmon three times in the 36 hours we spent there. Porvenir is a quiet place with marshes and startling though subtle views. It is not a tourist favorite, like Isla Magdalenas or Puerto Nales (below), but it was my favorite side trip.
We took a tourist boat to Isla Magdalena, an island that is reserved for penguins and human visitors. Two hours there, two hours back, and an hour to walk the one-mile circumference of the island with a group of bird lovers. It was thrilling and also sad. The temperature felt cold to us, coming from balmy Lima, but for the penguins, these 55-degree days are hotter than their bodies are made for. They lay low, moving as little as possible to avoid overheating.
Penguins , Isla Magdalena
Puerto Natales, at the doorstep of the Tempe Plains, was a three-hour bus ride. We spent two days walking back and forth on the coast, amazed at how much the view of snow-capped mountains changed as clouds moved in and out and morning turned to night. A very relaxing time, enhanced by tourist-oriented coffee shops, some with views of the glaciers. David photographed birds. He said Puerto Natales was the prettiest place we have been to, and that is saying a boatload.
The Reserva Nacional Magenalles is just five miles out of Punta Arenas. It has walks through scrappy forests and fields where tiny yellow and red blossoms grow in late summer, on soil fed and depleted by the rise and fall of glaciers. The park was at an elevation. Walking back, we turned a corner and saw the town nestled along the water.
We stopped in our Happy Place, an LGBTQ-friendly, bright, and sunny coffee shop decorated with gay and trans history, and a line with little clothespins where guests have posted their coming-out stories, making a paper rainbow. In the face of a reactionary political turn, it was a place that reminded us of what we should know all too well as people from the United States: the regime at the top is not the people.
Salvador Allende Avenue, Punta Arenas
Chile, February 2026
Chile in February 2026 was on the verge of political regression. President-elect Jose Antonio Kast, inaugurated on March 11, represented a sharp turn back to Pinochetismo. Augusto Pinochet was the general who assumed power after the US-sponsored coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende, in 1973. David and I were both not aware of Chile in 1970—we were 12—but we both wrote college papers about it a decade later, before we knew each other. The idea that the United States encouraged electoral democracy in Latin America died for both of us as we researched US covert involvement in Allende’s overthrow and support for the military dictatorship that followed.
Kast had supported the continuation of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. He is the son of German immigrants who served the Nazi regime and emigrated in 1950. Despite his immigrant roots, he ran on an anti-immigrant platform, promising to build a fence and moat on the Peruvian and Bolivian borders. His rhetoric targeted Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants. He promised to Make Chile Great Again.
Croation-Chileans
Kast was replacing Socialist President Gabriel Boric, who grew up in Punta Arenas. Boric’s ancestors were part of a large migration from Croatia to Patagonia. Mostly men at first, who left the warm Adriatic for the icy Antarctic in search of gold. Some became mine dueños. Most became working-class miners, sheepherders, and fisherpeople.
Like European settlers in the US, some were more responsible for the genocide of the Indigenous people than others, but all profited. As in the US, the settler colonialists wanted land, not workers. They massacred and force-marched the indigenous people. They created reservations bent on destroying cultures. They outlawed Indigenous languages, imposed Christianity, and concentrated people in ways that spread disease.
And now they have a complicated story to tell. Croations are celebrated with plaques and statues along the wide one-way boulevards that surround the town.
The history of hardscrabble Punta Arenas sheep herders is celebrated in these statues.
Today, the Balkan states like to think of themselves as European nations without a colonizing past. But settler colonialists from Albania and the former Yugoslav countries ventured to the Americas and Africa, where they displaced Native people and profited from their land and labor. The contradictions of these histories came together in the 1970s when Tito in Yugoslavia championed the anti-colonial movements of non-aligned nations of the Global South, while also celebrating the contributions of Croats to Punta Arenas.
And of course, they did make positive contributions. They built communities, mutual aid societies, and labor movements. We loved finding the monuments, photographs, and museum plaques celebrating their labor, struggles, and solidarity as sheep farmers, fishers, and miners.
Chile is a mining country. Gold is still an industry in Porvenir. They are still making money for someone, but they only hire seven people. It’s all mechanized now, said the man who made us our third salmon sandwich. Nationally, Chile is a copper country. It was the US-owned ATT and Anaconda Copper, working with the Nixon administration, that made the Chilean economy scream after Salvador Allende nationalized the copper industry.
Today, the Global North is also salvating over Chile’s untapped lithium stores. His first day in power, Katz signed a mineral rights agreement with the United States. A few days later, he unravelled environmental protections, much to the delight of mining companies.
Memorial to those in Punta Arenas who were disappeared by the military dictatorship. Punta Arenas Cemetary
Chile teaches us to take the long view.
After gifting US mining interests, President Kast stood on the Peru-Chile border in the Atacama Desert—the driest place on earth—and promised to build a barrier. Days later, news sources posted an absurd photo of cranes pushing sand in the desert.
It is hard to watch. But Chile has had many sharp turns. Ten years ago, the country underwent an extraordinary process involving broad sectors of society to replace and rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution. Representatives of the 18 Indigenous nations, unions, students, women’s, and LGBTQ organizations participated in drafting articles and amendments. When it was put up for a vote, it did not pass, but the process and the document remain— a rough draft of what is possible.
Chile’s history, and its geographic diversity—low, high, wet, dry, hot, cold, resilient, fragile—inspires our fears and dreams for the planet. This chapter of world history is no more unjust than the one José Martí lived in, and our dreams need not be any less expansive. Hope lies in the long view.
Punta Arenas is at the southernmost point of the second-longest country. It is where land gradually gives way to water, where glaciers that stood for eons are falling into the sea. We are nowhere and everywhere, the host of the penguin island tour said: the end of the world.
Yet if you turn the map around, the end of the world is the begining.
This essay about a visit to Punta Arenas, Chile, February/March 2026, is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.