Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

This paper studies the production of urban space in Bolivian writers Blanca Wiethuchter’s El jardin de Nora (1999) and Rodrigo Hasbún’s Los afectos (2015). Both novels follow the lives of German immigrants to Bolivia. In El jardin, Franz and Nora try to shore up their German identity by planting a garden filled with German plants in Laz Paz’s arid topography. Their efforts to subdue the city’s stony geography reflects the tenacious hold of their memories of Germany. The fissures cracking their garden’s land symbolize an urban space that cannot overcome the gulf between its indigenous working classes and the Europeanized bourgeoisie. Like Wiethuchter, Hasbún also explores intersections between imagination and the materiality of urban existence through a family of German immigrants in La Paz. The novel’s German explorer, Hans Ertl, grows distant from his family as he is sucked into the unfamiliar terrain of the Amazons in search of the fabled Paititi, the lost Incan city, even as his family adapts to La Paz. Ertl’s obsession with this imagined lost city ultimately molds his daughter Monika’s engagement with the guerrilla revolutionaries in the 1960s. In both texts, the immigrants’ affective baggage indents La Paz’s ecology, society and political movements. My paper explores how these immigrants’ imagined spaces impact La Paz’s social geography. It will foreground immigration as a flow that keeps the urban space we inhabit in constant tension between memory, fantasy and material specificities.