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On 2nd January 2020 the streets of central Santiago read like pages of a manifesto. The city was rumbling and it was written all over the walls; no Spanish was needed to understand what pictures of a burning constitution meant. Baquedano metro station felt like tear gas and people’s clothes had been hung out across the entrance. Something was happening. To find out, I had to listen. “We are asking for our dignity” said the walking tour guide as she explained why a 30 Peso increase in rush hour metro fares, which triggered protests back in October, had galvanized the country ever since. High metro prices spoke to deeper frustrations about the cost of living and then the state itself. Later this year Chile will vote on whether to re-write its constitution introduced by the dictatorship now three decades fallen. Under the constitution, ‘the entire system of social rights is marked by a preference for private property’*. The government is not allowed to do things businesses could, like provide education or transport. As she told us about the people retiring into poverty under private pension schemes, I realized that, even in death, people cast shadows. Pinochet’s body was gone but his legacy was not. There was more paint than exposed wall on the streets we proceeded to walk. ACAB and anarchy tags faded into the background as she showed us how streetscapes catch stories destined to fall from the pages of the victor’s history. Brick and sandstone canvassed stories of colonialism, patriarchy, class-struggle, marginalization and state-violence. I remember eyes, lots of eyes, everywhere. Tagged, printed on posters, painted into elaborate murals, some with eyeballs, some without and lots with crosses through them. Those walls saw everything. They knew what happened in the tunnels below Baquedano station. There was no graffiti in the area surrounding the President’s Palace. Forty-seven years ago this building was invaded by the military on the date terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Centre. They set it on, fire using grenades secured for them by CIA agents. The socialists inside died. Our guide’s father and his friends disappeared. They disappeared like the people whose clothes hung outside the metro station, surrounded by memorabilia of the lives that used to wear them. She told us about the coup and the Junta, and encouraged us to go to the Human Rights museum which documented its crimes in an attempt to stop history repeating itself. “I cannot enter, it’s too much for me.” “But you should” she added. Her words were a sobering reminder of the privilege inherent in travel. We were outsiders with enough distance to separate the optics of struggle from the struggle itself. We will never know the emotional labor she performed that day, unraveling her history to help us make sense of the writing on the walls. The tour disbands at Baquedano Plaza. The population walked toward it as I walked away. They cheer at busses spraying anti-tear gas solution down the main road. A girl with hot orange hair set the gutter alite and joined hands with a man. Together they crossed the road. I left my country Australia as it burned through a summer of discontent and I never expected to feel the flames walking down streets on the other side of the world. But this wasn’t my home. I was a guest, and it was time for me to go. *Citing Jamie Bassa (Constitutional lawyer at University of Valparaiso). Sourced in ‘Explainer: Chile’s constitutional conundrum – to change or not to change’ (Natalia Miranda, Reuters, 7 Nov 2019)