The Token

What’s it actually worth?

Right now, you’re looking for a bang. A set of words that will pique your interest and knock your socks off. I know it, reader, because you have the attention span of a 🐠🧠. There are seven hundred notifications tempting you to ditch this and fidget with your phone. You think “necesito una entrada de muerte, win me over fast or I am out of here.” I get it. I understand why you want this, but the thing is, I don’t do bangs, it’s not my style. I will not only pique your interest but awaken it slowly with a mix of smarts, laughs, some silly gifs, y un español un poco gamberro pa’ cuando el inglés se ponga soso y repetitivo.¹

By the end of this post —because the end is what matters to me— I expect your gears to turn and for you to feel physically happy, like you feel after a good workout in your body. Let me make it clearer: you know how the internet can suck your brain into a rabbit hole of links, articles, videos and three hours later you have learned nothing, done nothing, and there is a void inside your soul? Well, my aim is to do the opposite. I want you to come out of here feeling that unique happiness that only reading something that fidgets with your brain and your soul can produce. Sí, sí, sí, “fidgeting with your brain” es una imagen un poco asquerosa pero es efectiva así que vamole. I know the aim is ambitious and the topic of souls may seem superfluous, but if I simply wanted to make another random article I would just send you a link to an existing one. Instead, this time, I’ll lead you to understand what gives anything value.

This post is part of a newsletter. That’s our genre, and whether we like it or not, this genre is mostly a marketing tool. It is all about amassing eyeballs, about gaining your trust so you return for more and bring more eyeballs like yours here. Because of this, I cannot simply follow your whims and desires; I have to follow those who know, i.e. the marketers. They have the data and the algorithms, they know your behaviors better than you know them yourself. Here’s what they say:

Therefore, at the very beginning of each post, I should give you three or four (not more!) bullet points on the content of the post, to save you the trouble of reading this whole thing if you’re in a rush —God forbid you read. This should be immediately followed by social media links, so that you can share this post instantly and effortlessly on all your social media platforms. Only after all that comes the content -el relleno de la empanada- but that is secondary. See? No bang brother, puro PowerPoint pa’ mi gente linda y listo. 

I am compliant, so here’s a neat summary of what you’ll read:

• The story of how a Philadelphia teacher became a national icon and how you know her face without knowing.

• A brief explanation on how the silver monetary policy worked, featuring Nico and Bubbo and the American Dream.

• A section where I justify why you’re reading this by telling you the story of my grandfather.

• A hand-minted NFT for whoever makes it to the end alive.

Here’s the share link:

Now that the marketers are happy, you are dissatisfied as usual, and I am a little hurt because the share button is ugly, we are ready to start.

Silver Dollar Coin

On Monday April the 26th 1926 an article titled Goddess on Time magazine started with the following paragraph:

Time Magazine: https://time.com/vault/issue/1926-04-26/page/11/.

Yeah …

²(👈)

The goddess was Anna Willes William, born August the 15th, 1857, in Philadelphia. She was the daughter of Henry Williams and Eliza Ann Willes. Sadly, we know nothing about the Williams family ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Of The Willeses, we know a lot. They came to Maryland from Scotland during the 17th century. They established themselves there and became quite wealthy. They did it the way the settlers did in this part of the world in those days: they owned slaves and had a plantation. El sueño americano del siglo XVIII. Un poco cínico, pero real.

Dr. Arthur H. Willes, Eliza Ann’s father, however, doesn’t seem to have been very good at the family business. Before Eliza Ann married Henry he had already lost all his wealth. His brothers on the other hand Peter John, William Henry, and Richard Short moved to Texas in the 1830s and became really rich. They did it the way you did in that part of the world in those days: they built a merchandising company that was very prosperous. With the cash they got they bought lots of land.

Because life is cool like that, once you have lots of any kind of scarce resource, you can speculate at pleasure. And so they did; when the railroad construction started booming in Texas they provided both the land for the rails and the supplies for the laborers building them, which in turn brought them more and more business. It was what the venture capitalists of today call the first-mover advantage. It was a win, win, win. El gringo dream del Siglo XIX³.

Our goddess Anna didn’t grow up in wealth, quite the opposite. Just like her grandfather did, her father lost all his wealth before she could use any of it. To make matters worse, he died when she was one year old. It was up to her mother to raise all the children and provide them with an education⁴. She also supported her sister Martha, Anna’s aunt, who never got married and lived in her house till she died. If you ask me, Eliza Ann is the hero of this story. Shush reader! Yo sé que no me preguntaste nada. También sé que esas muletillas retóricas son medio chimbas. Pero qué podemos hacer. Yo escribo como hablo parce⁵.

Anna Willes Williams dedicated her working life to education. First, she was a teacher in the House of Refuge of Philadelphia, an orphanage that was founded with the intention to give education and opportunities to the poorest orphans of the city. Doing a little research on this institution, one comes out with the idea that this is a classic Hollywood orphanage: more of a prison than a school. Like most things Hollywood there should be some truth to the form and a complete re-interpretation of the content. In any case, Anna didn’t stay there long. In 1891 she started teaching philosophy and kindergarten⁶ at the Normal Girls School. After that, she became the City of Philadelphia’s Kindergarten Supervisor, a position that she held till she died in 1926. Her death was the least goddess-like death you can imagine: in December 1925 she fell and hit her head. She spent the handful of months she had left in bed with apoplexy.

Okay, that gif was a little cruel, but with a smile on your face we can go back to the start: “Last week in Philadelphia a goddess died,” as I haven’t explained the goddess part yet. Storytelling is not a commutative task, dear reader. The order of operations matters a lot. And even though everything I am telling you is factual, the order in which I narrate it remains my creative freedom.

In 1878, before she was a teacher Anna was an art student. She belonged to the group of apprentices mentored by Thomas Eakins⁷. At this very same time in history, the very young and handsome, and very British George T. Morgan was looking for a model that had both a very American beauty and a very Greek profile. Morgan had been brought to the U.S. by Director of the Mint Henry Linderman, who was not satisfied with the local engravers. They didn’t have enough oomph for his taste. Linderman needed something posher, so he asked C.W. Fremantle, Deputy Master of the Royal Mint in London, to recommend a first-class engraver. Morgan arrived in Phili in 1876. Two years later he got his first consequential assignment: he was to design a new half-dollar coin. It should include two unmistakable American symbols: the bald eagle and Liberty, the goddess.

Morgan might appear very conservative to the modern eye, but truth is he was very avant-garde. He didn’t want to do a copy of ancient Greek models for Liberty, which was the standard. He wanted his designs to come from real living beings. That’s why he wished for a very American model with a very Greek profile to pose for him. Morgan had met Eakins —el pintor de arriba— through the art circuit and would confide in him his design ideas. When the goddess model chat came about, Eakins recommended and introduced the nice British gentleman to his student, Anna Willess Williams. Morgan was instantly struck. This was it! It took Eakins and Anna’s friends a lot of convincing to get her to pose —five full afternoons to be precise. In the end, she accepted under the condition that her identity should never be revealed.

In October 1878 for reasons I will explain later, the master of the Mint changed plans abruptly and urgently. The half-dollar was instead to be a one-dollar coin and they needed it for yesterday. Fortunately, Morgan was ready, and so he sent Anna’s profile design to Congress for approval. One month later the Mint of Philadelphia started coining what is now called the Morgan Silver Dollar. Rapidly, it became the most famous coin in the world. And with it, the very American and very Greek profile of Anna Willes Williams made it to the pockets and wallets of all kinds of people across the globe. This is how Anna became a goddess.

Doesn’t it feel good to finally see her portrait? To know why she was a goddess and of what kind? If I had shown this to you earlier it would have simply been another coin with a nice portrait. It could have been just another random fact, but now it’s a human, or at least the story of a human, with its sweat, blood and tears. Now it's worth it, you see.

It took us hundreds of years, at least three plot lines, hours of fidgeting through old documents, and a series of dense and convoluted paragraphs, but we made it to the first juncture of this story. We have just set things up. Alistamos la masa, cortamos las papas, tenemos la carne lista, el ají está reposando pa’ que coja picor, y el aceite se está calentado. Ahora es que toca hacer las empanadas. If you haven’t done so already, bring yourself a cup of tea or coffee, or a beer, nobody’s judging. Just get comfortable and get ready, this is about to get better.

Printing Money

Until 1873 in the United States, if you had some silver laying around you could just go to the most convenient Mint office and turn it into legal dollars, minus a minimal coining fee. Imagine how cool that was! Let’s say you found silver on your property, and let’s say it was enough for you to need to hire your cousin Bubbo to help you mine it. You know the government has a fixed price for it: in the early 1870s, the law said the government had to pay you $3.80 for every 100gr of silver you gave them⁸. They have no option. If you show up with pure silver, they have to pay you.

You do your math and you figure out you can mine a kilo of silver per day — that’s 1000gr, which makes $38 dollars per day of revenue. Bubbo is kind of broke, he is a student, has a long beard, can tolerate biblical amounts of alcohol, has a capacity to lie to your face that is uncanny, but his charisma is so strong that even though you know he is lying, you just want to go along with the lie because it just feels good.

This makes Bubbo very successful at finding lovers every weekend, so all he needs to be happy is enough to feed himself to survive until next Friday and some extra dollars for the beer. In other words, you know he will take any fair price you give him. So you decide to pay him $2 per day y la empanada pa’ el almuerzo. Esto era lo que le pagaban a Anna Willes como profe, infiere de aquí lo que quieras. That leaves you with $36.

If your expenses to mine are $3, then you have a profit of $33 per day per 1000gr. That’s a solid deal. It comes at virtually no risk because the government HAS TO buy the silver from you at a fixed price. No product in the world has a guaranteed customer and a guaranteed price. You are quite literally printing money. Isn’t that great?

It is! Until it isn’t. Here’s the thing, your cousin Nico, who owns property next to yours, also finds lots of silver. He is smarter than you and Bubbo, and he finds ways to pay his workers less and a more efficient way to extract the silver. If it costs you $5 (Bubbo + expenses) to extract 1000gr of silver, it costs him $1. Ouch! Nico also doesn’t have time for nonsense, so he sells his silver to whoever wants it at a lower price than the government price, let’s say $35 instead of $38. He does that because he is still making a profit and because he doesn’t want to have to take it to the Mint and do the coining, paperwork, and general bureaucracy. He also has lots of silver, so he has the advantage of selling huge quantities. The result is you make $33 per 1000gr while Nico makes $35, and he doesn’t have to deal with the government.

Now imagine there are a lot of Nicos around you. That would mean the street price of silver is lower than the government price, effectively $35 per 1000gr. The silver producers are super happy because it is a win-win for them, but the government is overpaying, so they are not. That’s one problem. The second is that the fixed price of silver is fake because Nico can always hook you up 😉. And the third is that the cost of money for Nico is cheaper than the cost of money for the rest of us… Wut?

That’s pretty much what was happening when the 1873 Coinage Act became law. All factual except for Nico and Bubbo, who are in fact my cousins. Bubbo’s beard is mythical and they have no clue about silver. I merely used them as representatives of the silver miners of the 1870s. Solo pa’ ponerle color y ayudarte a entender más fácilemente la vaina. Anyhow, in 1873, the government was fed up with overpaying and decided to not let average Nicos, Bubbos, and Juans coin silver. It kept a fixed price for gold but stopped with silver, and with that:

The Gold Standard was born ← pronounce this phrase with the gravest tone you can. Imagine you are the narrator of a Lord of the Rings movie.

this is ultimately real life. You can imagine that the Nicos and Juans of the country got really upset when they realised their business model was ruined by the new governmental monetary policy. And so they pushed back; they lobbied, and fought, and convinced some politicians that this made no sense. Here’s where Representative Richard P. Bland from Missouri comes in. He sided with the silver miners and wanted the price of silver to go up and for the government to print more money. This would be good for the miners and the extra money would stimulate the economy, he argued. “Along with Senator William Allison of Iowa, they pushed through the Bland-Allison Act of 1878, which required the U.S. Treasury to do just that.”⁹ They won, big time. And this is precisely when Mint Director Linderman told the very young and handsome and very British Geroge T. Morgan to change the half-dollar design to a full-dollar and to print the hell out of it.

The Bland-Allison act was repealed in 1890, yet similar variants followed. For three decades the U.S. government kept subsidizing silver mining by routinely buying big amounts of silver from the market to artificially raise the prices. For three decades the government coined Morgan Silver Dollars in order to deal with this excess of silver. By 1921, when the last Morgan Dollar was produced, a total of 656,843,390 coins had been made. That’s how many Anna Willes Williams little silver portraits went around the world, a figure she simply could have never predicted. That’s how her stance as an American goddess was engraved in hard metal.

By now, your cup of coffee will be empty and you should be asking yourself two questions: 1) How did the world know Liberty was Anna if it was supposed to be a secret? 2) Why am I telling you this story?

You should be, because I want you to. It might sound simple, but the Nico’s and Bubbo’s silver tail can explain a lot of what is going on in the world right now. In any case, let me start answering questions and closing loops. Es hora de comerse le empanada.

Jorge Leonidas

Jorge Leonidas Acevedo Diaz arrived in the U.S. in 1928, two years after Anna’s death. He came through the port of New York City. He was a tall and quiet man. He probably wasn’t carrying more than his clothes, his papers, some money, y una ilusión. The contrast between Barranquilla’s customs office and Ellis Island’s must have been brutal. 

He came from Zapatoca. Un pueblo de algunos cientos de habitantes enpotrado en las montañas de Colombia, en esa manera que tienen los pueblos andinos de estar enpotrados en la cordillera. Esparramados ahí. Como si su fundador Don José Serrano y Solano se hubiera cansado de andar y arregañadientes decidiera fundar el pueblo donde lo cogió la fatiga, a puro despecho¹⁰.

The trip from Barranquilla to New York was a pleasant voyage through the Atlantic. Sure, he broke a toe in a swimming pool, but hey, there was a swimming pool! The hard part came before, in getting to Barranquilla. This had to be completed in as many modes of transport as were available at the time in that part of the world. It started with the treachours route that connects Zapatoca and Bucaramanga. If you feel adventurous and want to undertake that trip nowadays there is an excellent road, it is only a 65-km drive (20 miles) but the trip will take you two and a half hours. Blame the bumps; you are going from a height of 2133-m (7000-ft) to almost sea level and then back up. You cross an abyss, literally. 

In those days you could only do that length on a horse, the cars of the time just didn’t cut the mustard. Jorge Leonidas must have done it many times before, but I imagine this time felt different. Maybe the abyss he had to cross represented to him that other abyss he was about to go through. The metaphorical abyss, the one of the immigrant who goes from South to North with only his papers, some clothes, some money y una ilusón. But who knows. It’s easy to see metaphors when you write, it’s quite the opposite when you’re in them. That’s why psychics read your palm, the cards, the star charts, because reading is making sense, but living isn’t.¹¹

Jorge Leonidas went back to Colombia in 1932 and made his money the way you did in that part of the world in those days: he exported coffee and imported American goods to sell in his family’s hardware store —el sueño latinoamerican del principio del siglo XX? In the ’50s because of some disagreement with his brother he moved to Bogotá. He set up a milk farm that allowed him to raise five children and help with the education of nine grandchildren. He had to live through the worst times of violence the country produced. His cousin was kidnapped twice by the guerillas. In the 1990s the paramilitaries came to ask for money to “protect” his land from the guerrillas or else. At that point in time one never wanted to know what else meant. He sold it all for whatever price was offered to the first buyer he found. His life works in exchange for a hurried check. La ilusión que había comenzado en ese viaje a pie de Zapatoca a Bucaramanga terminaba ahora a la fuerza de los fusiles. It was not the ending he probably dreamt but it didn’t matter, the thing had served its purpose.

Ten years after his death, in 2008, I too moved to the U.S. to study. I also only had a bag with some clothes, my papers, some money, y una ilusión. When you uproot your life and move up North the first winter slaps you in the face with full force. There’s no easing into it. Fall is an idea that lasts two weeks. But as soon as the cold hits you, your bones let you know you are outside your element. Not that you need the reminder but it is good when the insides of your body are aligned with your soul. Y vamole de nuevo con lo del soul, ya sé, ya sé, que si lo mantengo no puedo seguir echándole la culpa a mi ineptitud y mantener el diálogo contigo lector como una excusa. The thing is, when you decontextualize yourself in that particular way, when you cross that hard-line from being a tourist to becoming an immigrant¹² that’s exactly when you find your soul, not a second before¹³.

Jorge Leonidas entered my thoughts constantly in those long weeks of December 2008. I use the English phrase porque era así que sucedía. Era un una imagen gráfica la que aparecía. No había palabras ni sónidos, sólo una figura larga y cayada, y entraba así no más, sin pedir permiso. He had lived through the 1929 crisis, I had arrived in time for the 2008 debacle. My experience - of course - was a lot less precarious, I was an email away from friends and family. I had the support of a University and a scholarship. Si mi viaje tenía un tinte definitivo no era por la dificultad de los tiempos, era por decisión propia. Jorge Leonidas was alone. Lonely in the most physical sense. I was lonely and lived in what I liked to call a digital solitude—a great name for an angsty blog or a cheesy jazz record. And in that digital solitude, I liked to believe that something tied us together. I liked to believe there was some kind of narrative, not just textual, but something biological that made us brothers in arms. Deep inside I fantasized genetic code could also drive life experience. I still hope it does.

Ya sé reader, me desmadré, me fui al carajo, far too emblematic. And yet it's honest. That’s what I thought at that time. In a weird-ass-lonely-graduate-student-in-the-middle-of-the-afternoon-smashed-by-the-weight-of-life way, I kept thinking about my Silver dollar coin. 

In those days I didn’t know anything about Anna or Morgan or the monetary policy of silver. I thought it was a 1929 dollar coin that Jorge Leonidas had brought with him from his trip. I thought it was given to me as a kid as some kind of rite of passage. His first work in New York was in the Stock Exchange. He was a roller skater boy taking orders from one trader to another. I thought he held onto that coin because he knew that one day it would be a meaningful symbol of the historical period he had the privilege to witness. I believed it held for him all the thinking and reflections of his lived experience. Back then, when I was living the same problems in my modern way, I felt like I was adding layers to that story. I was adding meaning to it. That silly coin united us, it was our thing.

Well … turns out it wasn’t.

On a recent visit, my father brought the coin back to me. I was excited but quickly realized that it was minted in 1921 and not 1929. My father also let me know it didn’t come from Jorge Leonidas either.

I was a little heartbroken. A part of my life’s narrative had lost color. I will not bother you with the true provenance of the coin because it’s simply boring and mundane. But I’ll tell you what I did next. I did what any Old Internet Person (a.k.a. OGI, OG Internaut) would do: I googled that coin. And I googled and googled away. I learned everything I have told you so far and more that I have left out because you’re probably on your third cup of coffee, or tea, or pint of beer. It was a great wander. I ended up in some obscure corners of the internet, and some even darker corners of … you know … my soul. At one point I decided to see if I could sell it, maybe get me a tattoo or some roller skates. Yeah, I was fishbraining in a rabbithole of internet links and bad videos. But that’s exactly when I found something that would tie this whole thing up. I realized value is determined by stories.

Let me take you there.

The end (keep reading idiot)

¹⁴ (👈) In the summer of 1879, a Philadelphia reporter made Anna’s identity and story public. That day she became a meme. I couldn't find the original newspaper or how she was discovered, but it happened, the Internet is certain. After that initial piece, several journalists tried to interview her. She got offers from a plethora of entertainment projects and advertising deals. Everybody wanted the Liberty Goddess to be part of their brand. She rejected them all and kept saying the coin thing was an “incident of her youth”. But the press was obsessed with her and wanted to sell the human story behind the coin regardless. 

In 1880, another Philadelphia reporter described her as having a “fair complexion, blue eyes, Grecian nose and crown of soft-spun golden hair”. Later on, in 1896, another reporter would add “she is slightly below the average height, is rather plump, and is fair. She carries her figure with a stateliness rarely seen, and, the pose of the head is exactly as seen on the silver dollar. The features of Miss Williams are reproduced as faithfully as in a good photograph.” Anna never wanted any of this, she never wanted to be famous, she never wanted to be a meme. However, the printing press loves mythic characters with a nickname —think El Quijote, and so she became *the Silver Dollar Girl*.

It was then that Morgan dollars stopped being just coins and became tokens (i.e. an object that acts as the physical representation of a story.) And that change is materialized in the fact that those coins now have very different values. I could take mine to the government and they will give me a one-dollar bill for it, or they can discount $1 from my taxes. That’s the official story, which is the belief that objects hold their original value. In other words that a dollar is a dollar. Alternatively, I could sell it on eBay for anything between $20 to $1000 dollars. That’s for the people that appreciate Morgan Dollars because of Anna’s and Morgan's stories. Or I could get it certified and guarantee that it was minted in San Francisco in 1921, and then sell it for anything between $2000 and $14000. This last one is for the people that not only believe and appreciate the Silver Dollar Girl story and that value Morgan Dollars because of Morgan, but that can also see in those coins the role they played in the history of monetary policy.

All these values are feasible. They all depend on the story behind them and on the two transacting parties agreeing on it. In other words, what makes them real is that you find another soul that believes in your story. And it is only in that shared belief that transactions can happen. Yes reader, I intentionally brought back the soul thing for a reason. If you are smart and backtrace all the times I used the word you can put it together. Don’t tell the economists, and the wise men with their stochastic processes, don’t tell the internet kidz with their cryptocurrencies, don’t tell the suits at Wall Street, but a token is nothing but a mediatic or physical metaphor representing both what somebody did for it and what you would do for it. It contains your past and future actions, and the story you attach to the thing. Because of this, tokens have all kinds of overlapping values, some astronomical and some null. That’s what allows you to transact them, that’s where their beauty resides. If you want to get a little bit theoretical, a token is the object that transports a meme. Personally, I prefer to say they are just metaphors of a story. It sounds better.

And with that, I have closed all loops but one. Why did I tell you all this? Well, I simply wished to add another layer to the story of my coin. No, no reader, I didn’t do it to add monetary value to it. I did it because the story I had before stopped being true. I needed a new story, a real one, a more honest one. And because every story needs an audience - otherwise it's not a story - I fished  you out (🐠🧠). So now you know, and I know, and our souls are at peace. And because I reward hard work, make sure to email me when you get to the end of this post, I will send you a special NFT to celebrate this accomplishment of ours: the humble moment our souls connected.

Till the next post.

1. The Royal Spanish Academy was founded in 1713, modeled after the Accademia Della Crusca (1582), of Italy, and the Académie Française (1635), of France, with the purpose "to fix the voices and vocabularies of the Spanish language with propriety, elegance, and purity". King Philip V approved its constitution on 3 October 1714, placing it under the Crown's protection (ref). Since 1780 it publishes El Diccionario de la lengua española. For most Spanish speakers this is the ultimate source of what is Spanish and what is not. It is as official as it gets. Like anything else, when you create an official source you also create a countermovement against it. But that’s beside the point. El Diccionario defines gamberro as: libertine, dissolute, or a person that comits rude or incivil acts. In its feminine it means prostitute. Yeah, I know, that’s a lot of sexist morals. So what I mean in this phrase is the following: sometimes in this newsletter , when my English gets boring and repetitive, I will speak in a bitching Spanish. Sometimes I will translate it, sometimes I won’t.

2. Al parecer ponerle pies de página a las imágenes no está permitido, por eso el emoji. Pero bueh, ahí tienes tu bang amigo reader. Ya ves, we don't do this kind of writing on the internet. It is too literary,  too aesthetic. There is too much language, too many adjectives. No, no, no. Here our style is matter-of-fact, it is more business-like, we need to be professionals. Sometimes a writer wants its thing to feel fresh so it throws some cool words in there, but in general, the internet is more ... data-driven? Yeah, that’s it. I don’t mean it literally, I mean its aesthetic. The internet wants to be evidence-based, well-educated, ivy-league produced, apple designed, whole foods consumed. Maybe if you are feeling adventurous then you try to sound like an NPR podcast. And so you start with a story then go back to what you want to say then back to the story then back to what you want to say and so on. There is a template for that. In any case definitely not: Last week, in her native Philadelphia, a goddess died. That's too much bang! On the internet, we are more on the side of PowerPoint writing and less on the side of writing-writing.

3. You can figure out why one is gringo and the other one isn’t. I am not here to explain everything to you. 😉

4. Here we have conflicting information. A copy of Cincinnati newspaper “The Co-operative News” from 1892, reports that Anna had 8 siblings. On the other hand, the careful job of the LDS church via ancestry.com confirms only 4.

5. Una muletilla retorica is a repetitive phrase used to aid discourse, and often unnecessary. Think of things like: “if I am being honest”, “if you ask me”, “I mean”, and so on. And yes, you are right reader, you don’t need them. But I do, because I speak that way, and I write the way I speak.

6. Kindergarten was subject in those days. Think of it as Early Childhood Education in today’s academic categorization.

Here’s a record of the 1900 Federal Census, when she is already a supervisor. You can find her in all the subsequent censi, until her death. Her address was: 634 N 12th St Philadelphia Pennsylvania, which you can see in its renovated splendor here.

1900 Federal Census.

Here’s a copy of her application to go to Switzerland in 1914. It was rejected because of the war.

That sounds so serious. What I mean is that there are documents on the internet that say the things I’m telling you about happened. Those documents are official and I fact-checked them. So things are factual. As for real … turn off the screen and go and learn how to do a cartwheel, that’s real.

7. It wasn’t until the moment I researched Anna that I learnt about Eakins. Un hueco brutal en nuestro conocimiento, pero sólo pa’ que te eduques don Thomas es el autor de esta pieza:

Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic). Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Un bang píctorico sin duda alguna.

8. The unit measure system used for this is the troy weight. It comes from the Romans, so it is definitely not fun. I did the conversion to the international system because I am nice.

9. https://janthinaimages.wordpress.com/2019/11/17/morgans-miss-liberty/

10. Can you see the difference when I switch languages? It’s more than a change of setting in your keyboard, it’s a different operating system. Yes, I also dislike the metaphor but there you have it, to the modern reader you need to talk in modern terms.

Here’s the translation though: “A town of a few hundred inhabitants nestled in the mountains of Colombia in the way Andean towns do. Scattered there, just thrown there on the mountains. As if its founder Don José Serrano y Solano had gotten tired of walking and reluctantly decided to found the town where fatigue caught him, out of pure spite.”

11. I could have used psychologists, psychiatrists, and coaches here. But you know, ya me cansé de hacerle juego a los clacismos intelectuales.

12. If you feel excluded keep in mind, that migration doesn’t need to be only geographical or spatial. Although this one is somewhat brutal. And then again, I am not responsible for your feelings, that’s your problem.

13. Or temporal resident. I am sure a smarter sociologist has an academic term for this. There is an identitarian change that happens when you know something has an end, versus knowing that something is an end.

14. Again, substack doesn’t let me add footnotes to titles. How rude! Anyhow, most writers will just put *the end* when it has already happened. They like to announce it. I don’t, I like to tell you that it is about to happen, I want to set you up for success here. You are welcome.