CHAPTER 3 - DISAPPEARED

“We lost him a long time ago,” Sara told her rumpled, sleep-deprived Shmooti as soon as he got off the train from Temuco. “But if we’re lucky, maybe we have a chance to get him back.” 

At first Shmooti didn’t know what she meant. They spent several weeks walking the streets of Santiago, through the warm late-summer light. They walked under the weeping willows of the parque forestal, next to the drought-shrunken Mapocho river, and sat on a wrought iron bench near a bridge that, for some reason, day after day, they knew how to find.

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Born in Santiago, Chile, Florencia Mallon grew up in Latin America and the United States.  She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Yale University.  She has taught Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1982, and in 2006 was named the Julieta Kirkwood Professor of History. A prize-winning historian, she received the Bryce Wood Award for Best Book in Latin American Studies for Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (1995); and the Bolton-Johnson Prize for the Best Book in Latin American History for Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Indigenous Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2000 (2006).  She is the recipient of several national fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, and a Fulbright Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship.  She is one of the founding editors of Duke University Press’s Book Series on “Narrating Native Histories.” Florencia Mallon lives in Madison, WI with her husband of more than thirty years, fellow historian Steve J. Stern.  They have two sons.  This is her first novel.