Bogota envelops you. The grand metropolis that defies odds by being on a plateau 2600 meters above sea level sits in the middle of the andes surrounded by even larger mountains. Standing in the middle of the capital it is hard to know if those mountains around the city, the beautiful fortress of the chibchas, serve as a type of comforting protection or as a chocking entrapment. It is hard to know.
But that seems to be the case with most of Bogota. It is just hard to know anything except the most obvious, unimportant facts. Facts that become, to a certain point, the only abstract common experience that is shared by its diverse population, and simultaneously, the only concrete and true things that can be said about the capital. I know that Bogota is 2600 meters above sea level, because Bogota's city slogan is, “Bogota: 2600 meters closer to the stars.” It brings us pride as Bogotanos to know this unique fact about the capital of our country, yet it tells us nothing specific about our experience in the capital, it tells us nothing about Bogota itself.
A couple of years ago, for the first exercise for my video class at Williams, I made a short video of appropriated material. The starting point was Mr and Mrs Smith, and its very short, but meaningful, depiction of Bogota. In the movie, Mr Smith and Mrs Smith are both secret agents, unbeknownst to each other. They meet in Bogota, which is depicted as a jungle with helicopters flying over it as bombs explode in a midst of greens. The capital itself is little more than shacks, and for a city that is fairly cold, especially at night and in the morning, everyone is sweating a lot and wearing a ridiculously small amount of clothing. There are military men everywhere with huge machine guns reminding everyone that ,from the start of their relationship, Mr. and Mrs. Smith were in the most dangerous situation in the world.
My video mixed the images of Bogota from Mr. and Mrs. Smith with images from advertisements for Bogota made by the Bogota's Mayor's office. The ads had a basic thread, “Y tu, que sabes de Bogota?” “And you, what do you know about Bogota?” followed by beautiful images of the capital which included lots of playing children, beautiful malls, beautiful parks and cultural events, the unexpected and unrecognized beauty in Bogota. The images flashed one after the other, with dramatic music that seemed to signal forward motion.
The last set of images I used for the video was a preview for a documentary someone had posted on YouTube, Yo Soy de Bogota, where you heard several people saying the frase “I am from Bogota” and then a man speaking about the “reality” of Bogota and Colombia. He suggested that all Colombians are like brothers and sisters and that the stories about drugs and kidnapping are just stories that make us all look bad and hide the truth about Bogota and Colombia.
In class I was told by my peers that it was interesting to point out the misrepresentation of Bogota in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but they thought I had gone far too much to the other side representing Bogota as a dream-like place and thus had failed to present a true sense of Bogota. At the time, still wrapped up in the hours that it took to edit my first video, I took the criticism thinking they had a point. But now, as I prepare to return to Bogota, I cannot help but think that the whole video, more than a statement about what Bogota really is, was a question. What is Bogota, in fact what do I, after having lived there for 13 years, and then experiencing what life is like outside of Bogota for 9, actually know about the capital? Is it the beautiful images? The nice people? The most dangerous, backward place in the world?
It seems as if all I know about Bogota for sure is that Bogota, Bogota no tiene mar, Bogota no tiene mar, pero tiene ciclovia.
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