A topology of economic exception 

VOICE OFF: What keeps mankind alive?

GINNY JENNY: The fact that millions are daily tortured, stifled, punished, 

silenced and oppressed. Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance 

In keeping its humanity repressed

CHORUS OFF: And for once you must try not to 

shirk the facts, mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera

In the early 1990s, when Colombia was still in the early stages of its economic aperture, my parents and I used to vacation in San Andrés and Providencia. Located off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, these islands had changed hands since their discovery in the early 16th century and were later disputed by the crowns of Spain, England, and France (and even the First Mexican Empire), until the signing of the Esguerra-Barcenas treaty in 1928 gave Colombia control of the archipelago. San Andrés had been a tourist and commercial center since 1953 when the government of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla declared it a duty-free port, which is why many middle-class families travelled to the islands to buy consumer goods—mainly electrical appliances, perfumes and imported clothing—that were not available in mainland Colombia. 

One day, while we were walking along the esplanade, my father—an avid tennis player—had us go into a sporting goods store. My aesthetic vein got the better of me and almost immediately I fell in love with an Andre Agassi Nike uniform that came with a black sleeved T-shirt with a teal upper chest and a diagonal band of dayglow green stripes, a black pair of shorts, and a pair of sneakers that had a phosphorescent green M shape drawn on the side, on top of which lay the famous swoosh. I begged my mother to buy it for me and to my surprise (at the time her policy when going out to a mall was “I’m only going to buy you food or books,” which was exactly what I wasn’t interested in), she agreed almost immediately. I was in heaven, only Agassi’s bandana (and mullet) were missing. When I arrived at the hotel I realized that the three pieces of clothing had been made in different parts of the world, the shorts I can’t seem to remember, but the T-shirt came from Cambodia and the sneakers from China. That night as we strolled along the esplanade looking for a place to eat I went over my geography lessons and imagined a ship carrying my clothes in containers from Asia, through the Panama Canal and into to the Caribbean. It would be almost a decade before I asked myself again—this time in college—why, even though I lived in a country with a robust textile industry, most of my clothes came from faraway places.