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“Which of these is your last name?” The tone and each of the words, pronounced with an accent in English of indecipherable origin, indicated that this was not a simple question to complete a formality. “If it is a last name, why is it not joined by a hyphen?” It is like asking why the highway that goes from Alaska to Patagonia is called the Pan-American Highway if it does not cross the Darien Gap. But this person did not want to hear environmental, historical or sociocultural explanations. He had a ruler to measure the world and my existence did not fit into it. “Occupation?” Astronomer. “And can that be studied in your country?”
There are few professional astronomers in the world and in Latin America. International Astronomical Union (IAU)the international organization charged with advancing astronomy around the world, has 12,734 registered professionals in 85 countries. About six out of every 100 professional astronomers in the world are in the countries of the Americas where Romance languages predominate, what we usually call Latin America. This percentage does not include hundreds of Latin American astronomers who practice their profession in other countries and are registered through other national associations, but it is not far from the portion of the world’s population in those territories; approximately eight out of every 100 inhabitants of the planet are in Latin America. So, those of us who come from that part of the world are not an exception in the international astronomical community. However, our representation in the collective imagination is limited, even in our own countries.
Ask someone close to you to close their eyes and think of a person who works in astronomy. Is it a woman or a man? What language do they speak? What is their skin color? The answer may vary, but it is very unlikely that they will imagine Guillermo Haro Barraza, Jorge Arias de Greiff or María Cristina Pineda Suazo. Have you seen or heard an astronomer explain a discovery on the radio or television in your language? In your country, as in mine, does the discussion of geomagnetic storms have to compete with news about the world of entertainment? Do they also invite a tarot reader to comment on the Nobel Prize in Physics? Is there also more space for zodiac signs than for science news in your local newspaper? Given how little we see in Latin America of our astronomers and astronomers—and our scientists in general—it is a miracle that we continue to produce them. Where do these people come from, who put on the jersey of their countries to represent them to the world if they cannot train themselves by hitting a rag ball in a field or singing in the streets like so many athletes and artists who are the international image of Latin America?
Hugo Levato, an Argentine astronomer who compiled one of the few references on formal astronomy education in Latin America, divided our countries into three categories. The first category is made up of those that are completely absent from the international astronomy scene. It is as if Paraguay, Nicaragua or El Salvador did not look up at the sky. In that category there are also countries with only one or two members of the IAU, which I naively imagine as proud Quixotes observing the firmament from Bolivia, Cuba or Peru, although this last country has its name written in the history of modern astronomy.
Near Arequipa, at the Harvard College Observatory station, the positions and light spectra of tens of thousands of stars in the southern hemisphere were observed at the beginning of the 20th century, which were later crucial in determining the composition and nature of this type of celestial objects. One version of the story, published in the Harvard University student newspaperspeaks of native workers employed exclusively in construction and poorly paid women in charge of analysis. Another version tells of the civil wars that bled Peru dry and kept foreign astronomers at the mercy of the warlord on duty, with suitcases in hand and holes in the ground ready to hide expensive lenses during the incursions of each new militia. The fact is that, with exceptionally clear skies, Peru is absent from the panorama of modern astronomy.
The second category of the study is made up of countries with at least ten researchers where astronomy was offered as a specialization in the physics degree. Among them were Uruguay, Honduras and Colombia, although many things have changed in the fifteen years since the publication of that work. Now we can add to this list Costa Rica, which in 2002 received its first planetarium in a donation from the Government of Japan and today sends talents to complete their training in the best universities in the world. Colombia has also come a little closer to the firmament, offering doctoral programs and consolidating itself as a country that exports scientific talent, although its results in international tests in physics and mathematics, basic skills for research in astronomy, show that the majority of its high school students are below the average of industrialized countries.
The last category is made up of five countries that had closed the cycle of producing doctoral-level astronomers, maintaining a research ecosystem with research institutes, doctoral scientists and professors. The political and social crisis has cost Venezuela its leadership in the region and has eroded the system that maintai
ned – despite the limitations – high-level astronomy research. Mexico, Argentina and Brazil are regional powers in natural sciences, although the swings of governments raise fears for their stability. Whether due to the supposed opposition between natural sciences and cultural tradition or the implacable fiscal adjustments to everything that does not produce immediate economic returns, the earthly binds those who dedicate themselves to understanding the universe from these countries.
Chile deserves a separate category as the gateway to the most transparent firmament on the planet. The exceptionally clear and dry skies of the Atacama Desert, clear for almost 300 days a year, have attracted more than half of the world’s infrastructure dedicated to astronomy. It is impossible to imagine modern astronomy without the observatories of Cerro Tololo, La Silla or Las Campanas, without ALMA or without the antennas of Llano de Chajnantor. It is impossible to imagine the future of astronomy without the Giant Magellan Telescope, without the Extremely Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory or without the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. What in other Latin American nations seems to be a luxury, in Chile is an opportunity for researchers, engineers, teachers, students, amateurs and, above all, for the global image of the southern country.
Chile’s astronomical wealth overflows beyond its borders. María Teresa Ruiz and her Children of the stars They have spread across the pages and screens of Latin America, just as Carl Sagan and his television program did before him. Cosmos. Where do the seeds that she and many other astronomy popularizers sow in our countries go? I would like to think that they have made our societies, so complex and unequal, a little better. Maybe some children understood that the popularity of horoscopes marks the pulse of a society’s credulity. Possibly some girls learned the fundamental role of women in pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. And perhaps some young people furnished their heads enough to understand that the heritage of the indigenous nations of our countries and the legacy of Western science can coexist to build a better world.
That suspicion becomes certainty when I see the faces of the young researchers who attend LARIM, the Latin American regional meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), or I read the words of many others who are looking for an exchange opportunity or a PhD position. I see the passion and rigor with which they embrace their work and I hide behind a smile as big as a marquee all the frustrations that I, like so many Latin American researchers, carry with me. I forget the queues for visas with which we justify our existence in countries with the resources to exploit our talent. The memories of prejudices, ignorance and distrust that we encounter along the way fade away. I keep the bad memories to myself because I am witnessing a miracle: that someone in our corner of the world feels that they can push the frontier of human knowledge to a remote place in the universe.
Each of them is a “Latin American astronomer,” with two surnames, to distinguish themselves from the others, not with the surnames that they must cut out or join with hyphens to sign their discoveries before the world, but with the ones they have carried in their hearts since they chose to explore the universe. They are formed by teachers who have chosen to stay in their countries, although they know that the potential of their students is only valued in other territories. They do not need to go back to the Mayans or the Incas with nostalgia thinking of a time when we could understand the firmament. They have chosen to look up at the sky in societies where it is easier to keep looking at the ground. They are not yet Edwin Hubble or Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin, but they face the universe with the passion and creativity that only come from our countries. They must persevere and do their best to see everything, to understand everything, and then tell it, because they come from the garden of branching paths, where a visa or a prejudice can close a door and they will have to invent another path. They must tell it so that others know that there is someone like them, someone who saw beyond the atmosphere and heard the secrets of the universe in our languages and our accents. They must tell it so that the flame of curiosity in our nations does not go out and we never feel that we have less right than anyone else to understand the sky that covers us all.
The author thanks Luis Nuñez de Villavicencio Martinez, Santiago González Gaitán, Anais Moller, Yara L. Jaffe and Juan Rafael Martinez Galarza for the conversations that inspired this article.
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