A few days ago I was talking with a good friend who had just returned from a trip to Argentina and Chile. We were talking about the 'countries' Argentinians, these gated, guarded, and secure communities that the upper-middle classes have had to build to feel safe in a country where the fracture caused by inequality translates not only into a considerable crime rate, although it has been decreasing, but also into a perception of insecurity that persists despite these measures. The explanation is simple, as my friend pointed out to me: the rich are afraid. They don't live in their ivory towers, exclusive apartment complexes, and luxury penthouses for aesthetic reasons—or at least not only for that—but because they are terrified.

Magdalena Cabrer has lived her entire life in Argentina, in Villa Cañás, but she has eight Mallorcan ancestry, as her godparents and father were born on the island. This is one of the first things she emphasizes when she meets someone. Whenever possible, she visits them and stays at her cousin's house in Port de Pollença. She returns to Mallorca to reconnect with her family, something many of the relatives who emigrated to Argentina were never able to do. "My godmother told us that they had carob trees in their house in Pollença. Before leaving, her brother hammered a nail into the stem of one to see if it would be there when he returned. But it never did," she recounts through tears, sitting on a white swing by the sea.