A gringa from Bogotá (article published when the book was released)

When journalist June Carolyn Erlick wants to stress a point, she repeats the word three times. When she explains what she needs to sit down and write, she says “coffee, coffee, coffee”, or if she is asked how the work went with her translator Patricia Torres, she answers: “excellent, excellent, excellent”. As if words were not sufficiently powerful to express all the feelings they can express. She lived in Bogotá during two important periods of her life, and during her most recent stay she decided to write a book with memories and feature stories about the city she left behind in 1984, and the metropolis she found in 2005. The title of the book is “Una gringa en Bogotá” and it will be launched on November 7.

She arrived in Colombia for the first time in 1975. At first, this was only going to be just one of the places she was going to visit in her one-year trip around Latin America. After studying philosophy, completing a masters' degree in journalism at Columbia University and working for five years, when she was 28 she decided to get to know this part of the world which attracted her so much. But during a walk along the Séptima (a main road in the eastern part of the capital) she fell madly in love with Bogotá.
 
And then it was fate which helped make that love grow even stronger, when she arrived in Cali, as there, without looking for it, she was offered a job as editor of Cali Chronicle, the El País newspaper's English supplement. Her job would be in Bogotá, and what was originally a visit of a few weeks lasted for nine years. “Colombia was exotic in many senses. But more than being exotic, it had become my home”, writes June in her book. And it is still her home, although she now lives in Boston and works as Director of Publications at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. After her first spell in Bogotá, she visited the capital on a yearly basis during the Christmas holiday season. But her desire to live here again was very great, and she made the most of the opportunity to come back, when she won a Fulbright scholarship to establish a masters' degree program in journalism at the Universidad Nacional, which is not yet functioning.

Back in the capital, she discovered that her beloved city had transformed itself, not only in terms of town planning but also as far as its culture and customs were concerned. “There is a sense of citizenship which didn’t exist before. In my first spell I had many friends from other parts of Colombia who didn’t feel they were residents of Bogotá. Now people take care of their city”, she told SEMANA. That is why she dedicated her Wednesdays and Thursdays for a whole year to writing what she saw, the stories she remembered, and the things that happened to her.

A lover of typical Colombian dishes like fritanga, chunchullo, mojicones and lengua en salsa, she adds that although she loves traditional food, she dislikes Chocolate santafereño (Colombian hot chocolate). She wrote the text in “Spanglish”, because although she speaks Spanish perfectly, some of the words just came to her in English. She always lived in the center of town and got to know most of the capital on foot. But she had a big problem during her second spell in Bogotá. Although she is a declared admirer of TransMilenio, which doesn’t mean she thinks it works to perfection, she suffers from vertigo and a fear of heights, and therefore footbridges have become an obstacle for her.

“I think we don’t often have such a fresh view about the country, without it being idealized. It is an analysis full of understanding, like when someone who appreciates you tells you everything without prejudices”, said Juanita León, a journalist who has been a friend of June’s for many years.

This hippie with long skirts and gray hair thinks Bogotá is going through a period of great hope. And since three seems to be her lucky number and she uses it to repeat her feelings, her third spell could come soon and be the definitive one, where she dedicates the rest of her life to watching the colourful sunsets that made her fall in love.
 
Article published on the 4th of November 2007