This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

De toda la vida is a common expression in Spain. It could be literally translated as ‘lifelong’, but that is not quite the way they use it there. They use it to convey the idea of something that feels immediately familiar. The closest English equivalent in that sense would be ‘just like grandma used to make’, whereas the opposite would be ‘not your mother’s’ something or the other. One summer I found myself traveling with my father across Spain, a trip to the old country with the old man. When we asked our waiter about a dessert option that sounded strange to us, he shrugged and replied: ‘Es el de toda la vida’ (‘It’s just like the one grandma used to make’). Although he was waiting tables in Madrid, a major touristic capital of the world, we could not get him to understand that we were not actually from there, and that what grandma used to make for him was not something that would be immediately apparent to us. We did speak the same language, though – to be sure, us with our South American accents, him with his Iberian one. The whole interaction transpired in Spanish (Castilian, more precisely), the result of centuries of European imperialism that, nonetheless, rendered us befuddled by the unexpectedly unfamiliar on that hot August afternoon in the heart of la madre patria, Mother Spain.

What we were doing there was almost taken out of a book of great American cliches: father and son traveling across the old country to look for the origins of the family name. Only, as native Chileans the old country for us means not Ireland or England, but Spain. According to my father’s research, our last name comes from a place located in the region of Asturias in northern Spain, a town called Cabañaquinta, the capital of Aller county. A small and eerie mining settlement up in the misty mountains of Asturias, Cabañaquinta wasn’t really anything to write home about, its only road engulfed by the humid, green environs that to us felt like a most welcome change of scenery after the torrid landscapes of Andalucía in the south.

We immediately located some sort of civil registry (‘City Hall’ would be a bit of a stretch for the tiny office) where we inquired about records of family names from the area. The clerk looked at us unimpressed from behind the glass, even though I am quite certain a visit by two people coming all the way from Chile must have been the most exciting thing that happened to him that day. Still, he was as unhelpful as he was perplexed by our inquiry, which resulted in zero findings of the last name Lobo.

‘I don’t know what to tell you, this is not a history museum’, he offered with dry Asturian compassion. I begged to differ. Armed with my ‘liberal arts confidence’ (a hilarious phrase coined by comedian Bert Kreischer), I tried to explain to him that to keep records of people’s births and deaths, their names and their family connections, is indeed a way of doing history by using a primary source that contains the information of scores of humans who are, at the end of the day, the drivers of history. Still, no ‘Lobo’ on record; ‘sorry you wasted a trip’, his half-closed eyes seemed to express – ‘but please come check again next year!’ would have been the perfect punchline, I thought to myself. And so, our quest ended with an anticlimactic and unceremonious conclusion, after which my father returned back home with nothing but a keychain with our family name engraved on it as a consolation price he got in some shop in Madrid. I stayed behind in Europe, my prater-colonial mind continuing to be bemused by the never-ending complexities of the post- colonial as I try to make sense of the many legacies of colonialism in our present.

South of the Border

After that trip, my father returned to the place our family comes from, a place where we are at least a matter of record. It is not just any place. It is a part of the world known these days as the ‘Global South’. It is a magical land that defies geographic conventions, as not everything south of the equator, that is, not everything in the ‘Southern Hemisphere’ is included in the Global South, excluding most notably Australia and New Zealand, which are considered ‘Western’ countries. Conversely, many places found in the Northern Hemisphere are also a part of the Global South, not least China, India, Pakistan, the entire Middle East and Central Asia, as well as the northern half of Africa, and all of Central America.

The Global South is also a wondrous place where the preternatural meets the praeter-colonial, as Sanghera points out when contrasting the traces of British imperialism found in the streets of New Delhi with the chaos of Old Delhi (Sanghera 2024, 11). It is the land of magical realism, the literary genre famously developed by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, where all things northern have to be imported before they can be truly experienced, just like the ice that one of his main characters was taken to discover when he was a child. It is also a place of abject poverty, where some of the world’s weakest economies are found. At the same time, the Global South is home to burgeoning economies boasting membership in the G-20, for example, China and India.

In short, and to use an old cliché, the Global South is a land of contrasts – perhaps so many as to render the label useless. Coming from such a space I often find myself wondering: As a Chilean, what do I have in common with someone from Pakistan or Angola? Don’t I have more in common with an Australian who, just like me, only knew hot Christmases growing up? Or with a South Korean who has seen their country transformed and Americanized by decades of neoliberal reforms, not unlike my own narrow strip of land in South America? And don’t I and the rest of my Latin American brethren have more in common with the US and Canada than China, seeing as we live in the same continent? Or with any European country, as we speak European languages, dress in European fashion and live and die under European institutions and forms of government?

Of course, I........

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