It is not clear if he will openly display them.
Yumbel Gongora is one person who hopes he does. He is a self-described “tattoo dissident”, and inked three intricate designs that fill Boric with imagery from his native Patagonia region.
It’s vital that people never forget their roots. Gongora said that this keeps you focused on your roots and what’s important… not lose in the fame.” Gongora was taking a break in her downtown Santiago parlor, decorated with feminist slogans.
Boric, 35 years old, won a historic victory over Donald Trump’s former admirer. He campaigned on the promise to address the nagging poverty, inequality, and other issues that he and his leftist supporters claim are the unacceptable underbelly of a free-market model established decades ago by the dictatorship imposed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Boric, a former student protest leader has made a career out of flouting conventions since his youth. When he was elected in 2014, he shunned the traditional suit & tie and opted for rock band T-shirts and jeans, and once even a Mohawk. This drew the ire from traditionalists.
He said that he couldn’t care less and dismissed the conventions as “a tool for the elites to differentiate themselves from the poor.”
In the lead up to Sunday’s runoff election, he took a more conformist approach — there was no tie but a dark sportcoat, dress shirts, and well-groomed facial hair — to appeal to more conservative Chileans who were nervous about voting for a millennial who counts as his supporters in Chile’s Communist Party.
Gongora stated that she spent months studying old Chilean maps to create the first tattoo she created for Boric almost a decade ago. It was a map of the ice-capped Islands and labyrinthine Fjords close to where they grew up, in Punta Arenas at the tip of South America.
She later designed two more: a lenga-tree that was twisted by strong southern winds, and an end of the world lighthouse that shines into emptiness. This was Boric’s left arm from a battle with depression.
Boric wrote that “a lonely Magellan lighthouse amid the stormy, mysterious seas in southern Patagonia,” in a 2018 Instagram post. “I will live there one day, but it lives with me in the meantime.”
Gongora’s piercings, tattoos, and dyed-green hair are a constant advertisement for her university trained artistry. She said Boric stood out to her urban hipster clients because of his humility, which she attributes to his upbringing in the countryside.
She felt betrayed by her fellow activist, when in November 2019, he made a deal to end nationwide protests in return for a promise to hold a plebiscite to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution. It was a risky political decision that at the time cost Boric the support of hardliners like Gongora, who identifies as a “anarchist-feminist.”
She voted for Boric, despite being apathetic like many Chilean youths, because she feared that Jose Antonio Kast, his conservative opponent, would cause a serious setback to women, indigenous rights, and the LGBTQ community in Chile.
Boric’s sketch for yet another tattoo is hidden in her binder. The two of them discussed it a while back. She doesn’t know if it will be inked, given the pressures of her new job and Chile’s future.
Gongora stated, “I hope he doesn’t stop being rocker.” “But I don’t know if this will work in politics. Then again, nobody ever expected such a young president.”
