Lived

Where it started.

01

Chicago

The Loop

You don’t see the system you grow up inside. You only learn it through contrast. It took leaving to see Chicago’s: a long winter, suffered together. Someone opens up their basement, the neighbors come over, and the whole city waits out the cold for Cubs games, festivals and the block parties of summer. House parties kept Chicago alive. Fittingly, it also invented house music.

Sources: House music, Chicago, early 1980s

Then I left, and the first thing I learned was how wrong a reputation can be.

02

Medellín

El Poblado and Laureles

A city in a valley, cut off by mountains and then by its reputation. In 1988, Time called it the most dangerous city in the world. Twenty-five years later it was named the most innovative. Nobody rescued it. It cleaned itself up through sheer will: cable cars up the hillsides, libraries where the violence had been. Chaos on the surface, and underneath it some of the kindest, happiest people I’ve known. Magical realism, it turns out, is just realism there.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Sources: Time, 1988, Wall Street Journal and Citi, City of the Year, 2013

Medellín taught me to look underneath. Mexico City showed me what a city can hold.

03

Mexico City

La Condesa

Twenty million people, and it refreshes the soul instead of draining it. La Condesa has the galleries and the jazz clubs. Walk a few blocks past it: taco stands, lively markets, reggaeton clubs, neighbors who know each other. That’s where the city breathes.

Culture isn’t only inherited. Lima built one on purpose.

04

Lima

Miraflores

A city that decided to become a food capital, built the kitchens to prove it, and won. A place can choose what it’s known for: the best brand strategy I’ve ever seen. But it doesn’t run deep. A third of Peru lives in Lima, and Lima makes nearly half of its GDP. Outside it, life looks like a struggle. A brand can lift a city without lifting a country.

Sources: APEC, 2017, from INEI data

If a place can choose what it becomes, it can also choose what it keeps.

05

Buenos Aires

Palermo

Europe, on the far side of the Atlantic. A city that never forgot where it came from, and still demands quality in everything. It also mourns, and keeps trying to move on. Land at Ezeiza and you’d never know that in 1973, a few miles from the runway, the crowd that came to welcome Perón home became a massacre. Then came the dictatorship and Operation Condor. Outside what are now some of the most peaceful neighborhoods in Latin America, the sidewalks remember: a tile on Scalabrini Ortiz, in Palermo, marks Daniel Jorge Bertoni, a veterinarian and father of four, disappeared by state terrorism on September 2, 1977. Now people are focused, heavily, on peace, quality of life, justice and community. A city can keep its past without being kept by it.

Sources: Memoria Palermo: Daniel Jorge Bertoni, the Ezeiza massacre, Operation Condor, the Dirty War

Across the Andes, a country still deciding what to keep and what to tear down.

06

Chile

Santiago’s Bellavista and Centro, then Patagonia

Santiago wants stability, at almost any cost. Pinochet left a mark you can still feel. Buenos Aires sets its memory into the sidewalk; Santiago holds it in people’s hearts. But people striving for a better quality of life will tear down what doesn’t work. In 2019 the protests left whole blocks of central Santiago scarred; a year later, 78% voted to replace his constitution. Then they rejected two drafts, and kept it. As an American, I learned what it’s like to be the foreigner people are wary of, and why: here, the United States isn’t an abstraction. It’s the coup in 1973. Further south, Patagonia: the real land’s end, where isolation is beautiful, and taxing.

Sources: the US and the 1973 coup, 2019 protests, 2020 referendum, 2022, 2023

Eventually I went back to where so much of it began.

07

The Iberian Peninsula

We inherit our systems the way we inherit our genes. It goes deeper than language: the same flavor of bureaucracy, the same faces. Thousands of miles from Medellín, I kept recognizing people I’d never met and systems I’d never seen. Not everything crossed the ocean; Colombia built plenty of its own. But enough did. It’s a trip.

And then another city in a valley.

08

Phoenix

Planted, for now. Still exploring when I can.

A community within a valley. Nearly five million people, and one of the only places that has ever felt like one cohesive community. It feels like everyone knows each other, despite how large it is. A city can be vast and still feel like a neighborhood.

Sources: 2020 Census, metro Phoenix