I an no writer I will attempt to explain this concept in story form.

(in process)

My aunt is 87 years and quite witty. She told me old age is a lonely time. She is the youngest of six children and all her siblings have all passed away. 

Now she lives alone with the maid she has had for twenty years in a very large row house in Santiago, Chile. She was born in this house. Next to her is the St George School a prep school that began in the row house behind her and over the years has grown to take over the entire block with the exception of her house and the house of her neighbor Margarita. Across the street there are only two buildings that are are still residences. For many blocks in all directions the once residential neighborhood has been replaced with automobile related shops. 

Margarita is 53 years old also was born in her house also, making these to women the closest of friends. 

Yesterday I took her to lunch and on our return we had to take a detour through a street a block away that we generally don't travel. She said, " I went to school there", pointing to a group of small  buildings that are now auto repair shops. I said, "what a shame that this neighborhood has disappeared."

"Would it not have been nice if you could still have had that neighbor hood, if the families had remained, the children in the streets, the grocer on the corner the dentist, the doctor. With your community, these years of old age would not be so lonely".

The reason that the community is no longer there is economic. I don't mean money, for she has plenty. What I mean is that the community had no economic system to hold it up. It had no inherent structure to it, it existed when it did as a transitory aspect of a larger economic system.

When I was a child I spent almost a year in my aunts house.  It was 1963, I was nine years old. I had gone to Chile with my mother to sell the house my father built and where I had been born. The house we were selling was in Las Condes, a new (then) and up scale neighborhood toward the mountains. Today that house is no longer there nor is the neighborhood. What stands in its place are tall apartment and upscale office buildings.

That time when I was nine was the only time I ever truly experienced what a community was like.

My aunt was much younger then and far from alone. My uncle Javier lived there with his daughter who was studying at the University. My other aunt Alda was still alive and was an avid smoker. My grandmother Julia was the matriarch and governed with a wooden spoon. My mother and I were given a room and instantly made welcome.

My aunts current neighbor Margarita was age 8 and her sister Carmen was 9. We as children would build soap box carts and run them down the streets with the other children on the block.

Once a week the "feria" would come to the street a block away. Farmers would bring their produce, set up stands on the street and we as children would walk with the aunts to haggle over the price of vegetables.

The bakery was a block away and the smell of fresh backed bread would permeate the air in the mornings.      

This was a neighborhood a living organism.            

There is a mechanical or economic reason why this no longer exists. Within the very nature of our current socio economic system there are forces that dissolve these environments into a more separated individualistic society. There is incentive to tear down these systems, to isolate individuals, so as to create greater consumption for a mass production and distribution system. 

My grand father who began this family had died almost the same week that I had been born. A dedicated mason, he had been one of the original founders of the Masonic temple that was less than a mile away. This fact made the house filled with talk of politics. Neighbors would come by and I could remember the debates over the upcoming elections of Salvador Allende. Socialism, Capitalism, Communism were spun by the adults for we children to hear and grow to understand. Here was the village where adults would transmit knowledge to the children simply curios as to what it was they were talking about.

My cousin that was in college, would study and flirt with her later to be husband. All the basic forms of human interaction were there to observe for us children. It was rich soil for children to grow in.

The one aspect that troubled me that year was going to school. I had to go away from that rich house of curiosity. School was a structured unnatural reality, of certain indoctrination it was like going from a home to some Orwellian boot camp. So for the remainder of the story we will change that. 

In those days home schooling did not exist as it does now. Imagine if a community such as this I describe with a home school team of teachers within the same block of the neighborhood. Teaches that would assist the families with the education of the children. A school yard just outside of your front door. A school integrated within the neighborhood.  So for the remainder of the story we will change school to home schooled. 

I was the "Gringo", the other kids called me, "el Americano Cinzzano" (a trade name of a vermouth sold there).  I was an outsider a foreigner. Although the neighborhood was kind,  I was an alien in this neighborhood.  In truth my neighborhood, the one I belonged to  was both in Chile and in the U.S.A, I only did not know that yet. I had been born in Chile and moved to the U.S. at the age of three. I felt American yet in Ashville N.C. where we lived I was not understood or accepted by the other children either. I was in limbo and I was aware of that.

A death occurred that year, John Kennedy was assassinated. Here I was far from my home in America yet this community this neighborhood felt it as though one of their own had been killed. A world away yet there was a connection so strong with these people in this neighborhood in Chile. "Asecinos" cried my uncle Javier as the news came over the radio. He was furious. My two aunts gathered with my mother in the parlor and weped. I knew then that although my friends in the U.S.A. had no idea where Chile was these people in Chile not only knew where the U.S.A was but loved its president, Kennedy.   

I know now that this organism that is the neighborhood is this world as well. That the misunderstandings the children had to me was not to me but to the how large their neighborhood really was.  

But this neighborhood was close knit... children could play supervised by the street itself. Watchful eyes were everywhere.  This fine neighbor hood is now something of the past. All the players of this stage have gone elsewhere all except my Aunt 

So at this point we will add something to this story a Chocolate Factory, well actually any industry or several industries would be fine. Beyond here this is fiction and story of this ideal community, the point of this website and its proposition.

So... Across the street from my Aunts house there was a 3 story building, the chocolate factory. My grand father had started the business. When he died my uncle Javier was put in charge of its operation. My uncle Carlos lived 4 doors down with his wife Olga and their two children Olgita who had been born the same month and year as I and her brother Carlito, that was two years older than me. The entire block both sides of the street was owned in common buy five families who all live on the block.         

At the end of the block the bakery sold Chocolates as well as cheese and milk. It was owned and operated by the Routers a German immigrant family that had come to Chile after the Second world war. They lived on top of the bakery with there only son 4 year old Alex. The Romolo Aguirre and his wife and two children  had the house next to the bakery and Romolo worked at the chocolate factory. Finally there was Axcel Nielsen that had recently married my aunt Agusta she was pregnant and waiting for her first child. Axcel worked for the united nations somewhere in town, he was Danish and could barely speak Spanish.

In the mornings at 7:30 we would all come into the dining hall for breakfast, My uncle Javier would sit at the head of the table, then around him would be Julia his daughter my two aunts that lived in the house and my mother and I, my grand mother imposing as she was would sit at the other end of the table. We would dress for breakfast order was essential in this house and it was dictated by my Grand mother and enforced by my uncle.

Promptly after breakfast all would be off to deal with the days tasks.

I would run across the street to the top floor of the chocolate factory where myself, Margarita, Carmen, Carlitos and Olgita would be joined by 10 or so other children of workers at the factory. Because I spoke English, I had been selected to help teach English to the other students. We hade been taught to learn mostly on our own. we had each our tasks assigned depending mostly on the level of knowledge of each student and not by our ages. Attention was given to who each of us as students were. What the individual  interest, ability and talent of each child was and then direct the learning to that end. Olgita  was given a greater focus on music she played the piano very well and would spend the mornings at home practicing with her mother. I was given American history and English to work with.  The parents of the children that worked at the factory or lived near by would often come into the classroom to participate and encourage their children's development and study. 

In 1929 my grand father had traveled to Geneva Switzerland to improve his chocolates. There he met Jean Piaget and from that time he decided to incorporate education of the children into his factory.

Before lunch we would go to the street. It was a wide street with wide sidewalks and lined with old sycamore trees. Barricades were put in place to prevent traffic from coming through and we would play for a time before going inside to our homes. The factory would serve lunch to all the workers so the children of the factory workers would go eat with their parents.   

After lunch we would go back to our studies and would leave at the end of the day with the rest of the factory workers.  

Later I would notice the efficiencies and humanity my grand father had built into his factory. Most every one lived nearby, no one commuted. If there was a problem with one of us in our school the parent was downstairs in the factory or in one of the houses on the block. If we had a field trip we all got into the factories' delivery vans and off we went. Resources were shared, if you had an electrical problem at home the factories mechanic would attend to it. Older students would work within the factory or local shops learning the trades and business that would later become their profession. My cousin Julia and her boyfriend Arturo who were University students  had worked for years now in the executive offices of the factory.         

 As the presidential elections grew closer the debate in the house and throughout the block intensified. It was Salvador Allende and Eduardo Frie. Most of the neighborhood was for Allende, my mother and father who was in Asheville were adamantly opposed to any communist ideology. Allende lost that election but won the next election.

This was my year in Chile. My mother succeeded in selling our house and we returned to my family in North Carolina. 

My father in 1958 had traveled to the U.S. twice looking for a place to establish an outlet for our chocolate. He had decided on Ashville N.C., a small town in the hills of North Carolina. He choose this town primarily because of its beauty and its resemblance to Switzerland.  There he leased a small store front on Wall St. in the center of town, and began importing and retailing our chocolate on that same year. By 1964 it had become a popular shop for our chocolate and we had several accounts in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh where we shipped our products directly to. By 1968 it had grown to the point where we needed a point of distribution. Shipping our chocolate from Chile directly to our accounts in the United States was inefficient and we needed a central point of distribution. My father choose the city of Atlanta because of its reputation as a transportation hub and proximity to Ashville. We were able to purchase our store front, and our home in Ashville remained as the house of the stores manager and a place for us to visit for Christmas. 

In Atlanta, we leased a house with an option to purchase and we lived upstairs 

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Last modified: 05/31/08