Innovators/Innovations

“I want to change the way we see our food and make it part of our identity abroad,” Mellado says. “In Chile [today] all you see are international restaurants. It’s a shame, because our country has so much to offer.”

Just naming some of the dishes that Mellado uses to instruct students at his school of 800 is enough to make the mouth water—pastel de choclo, a corn cake characteristic of Chile’s central region; caldillo de congrio dorado (golden conger eel soup), a favorite of poet Pablo Neruda; and humitas, Chilean tamales filled with sweet corn. Mellado concentrates on foods specific to the country’s four main geographic regions—Atacama Desert, Andes, Pacific Ocean, and Antarctic— and is a big advocate of using fresh, local ingredients, including seafood and native fruits and vegetables, such as avocados and blueberries.

A native of San Fernando in Chile’s central Colchagua province—a region famous for its agricultural and wine production—Mellado turned to cooking as a way to see the world. After graduating in 2000 with a degree in international cuisine from the Instituto Profesional Centro de Formación Técnica, Viña del Mar, he rounded off his education in Spain, landing a four-month internship at the legendary El Bulli restaurant on Spain’s northern coast—the best in the world before it closed its doors earlier this year. It was there he noticed the special pride Spaniards had for their national cuisine, a passion he realized was absent in Chile.

Mellado has been busy building that passion ever since—and not only among students. He recently resurrected Epopeya de las comidas y las bebidas de Chile (Epic Meals and Drinks of Chile), a culinary poetry book first published by Pablo de Rokha in 1960. The original version consisted of a 36-page epic poem dedicated to Chilean cuisine. For the new edition, Mellado compiled the recipes for every dish referred to in the book, laying the groundwork for a rediscovery of Chile’s national cuisine.

Mellado says he’s too busy to open his own restaurant. He has, in effect, become his country’s “food ambassador,” traveling to the U.S. and Europe to conduct seminars on Chilean cooking under the sponsorship of ProChile, part of Chile’s Trade Commission. “I want people to associate great food with Chile, just as they might with Italy or Mexico,” he says.

Waiter, bring us a plate.

Oscar Salazar, 33, founded CitiVox to get the right information to the right people. Based in Mexico City, but serving clients in Latin America and Africa, CitiVox was launched in 2010 by Salazar and his business partner, Jorge Soto, as a spinoff of their previous mobile-services enterprise, eflyer. The platform aggregates content from various communication channels—SMS, Twitter, interactive voice recognition, call centers, email, and social media—and funnels it into a “citizen relationship management” system for businesses and governments. This, says Salazar, enables decisionmakers to “deal better with the information flow and assign the appropriate person to fix it,” enhancing accountability and efficiency.

After redirecting messages, the system informs the person filing the initial request who the person assigned to the case is and the current response status. The benefit to CitiVox’s clients? Using mobile and crowd-sourcing technology, the company or government can generate a near real-time map of where problems are occurring or where the majority of requests are based, providing a snapshot of a community and its concerns.

During the 2011 presidential elections in Benin, for example, CitiVox provided detailed incident reporting, heat maps and other visualizations via SMS to Katrin Verclas. Verclas directs MobileActive.org, a network dedicated to harnessing mobile phone technology, and cited the company’s “sophisticated mapping, great data visualizations and better functionality.”

Clients also like CitiVox because it is very consumer-oriented. The company can provide customers with tailored reports of data and is constantly being modified to respond to customer needs. Henry Makembe, who manages a blog called Local Politechs about the use of web technologies in campaigns, also used CitiVox while monitoring the Benin elections and said that “on multiple occasions the [CitiVox] team added features in 48 hours or less.”

Salazar believes CitiVox will have significant social impact in two areas: creating transparency and enhancing efficiency. CitiVox helps governments reduce spending on advertising while offering them a means of receiving and visibly responding to input from the public. Increased transparency generates goodwill between the two pillars of society, according to Salazar.

By year’s end, Salazar hopes to expand the use of the CitiVox platform to two more public-sector institutions. Although the goal may sound modest, “we’re not focusing on volume,” he says. “We’re focusing on quality. Governments and decisionmakers should communicate better with their citizens, and we are providing an enhancement to existing communication channels.”

Bogotá municipal politics are part of his DNA—his father worked for Jaime Castro when he was mayor of Bogotá—but Luna did not follow the customary route to a political career. He became a community organizer while attending law school at Universidad de Rosario, and helped members of his Chapinero neighborhood in the northwest section of Bogotá restore a polluted local stream. That led to a successful 1998 run for the town council, where he prided himself on his accessibility. (Today, he uses the same cell phone number he gave to constituents.)

Two years later, at 25, he was elected as one of the youngest members of Bogotá’s City Council. And in 2006, Luna continued his political ascendancy with a seat in the National House of Representatives.

From his first time organizing his neighbors in Chapinero, Luna has made community outreach and communication a central theme of his governing style. As federal deputy, Luna meets regularly with constituents across his district in Bogotá and was the first to run an electronic policy campaign with a website called
elcandidatoesusted.com. Every month he posts a report on his congressional website about how he voted on bills and why, so that voters and the media can judge his job performance for themselves.

It’s a style that Luna is trying to bring to his own party. Before the May 29 local elections, Luna traveled around the country with other PL candidates to emphasize the importance of their work with local communities. He also urged voters to turn out for the ballot—regardless of who they planned on voting for. As he says, “The only way to defeat clientelism is to increase the levels of electoral participation, which in the case of Bogotá barely surpass 50 percent.”

Luna says he will bring the same style and approach to the multiplying problems of Colombia’s biggest city. Whether it is addressing Bogotá’s notorious traffic, deteriorating security or the low quality of education, Luna believes that improving the city’s management is a seamless extension of getting its citizens actively engaged in local politics.

In all of these, Luna thinks businesses must also play a role. Transportation infrastructure, he says, can only be improved with significant private investment, and he promises to hold open bids for construction. At the same time, though, he fears that concerns about crime and education threaten to drive investors away.

Those concerns about crime and security have also come up repeatedly in Luna’s meetings with communities and citizens. He believes, on the one hand, that sentencing has to be stronger for repeat offenders. On the other, he also believes it’s necessary to address crime at its roots by providing Bogotá’s youth with productive opportunities. He is proposing an education reform plan that would expand the school day from five to nine hours, increase teacher salaries, and improve curricula to build students’ core competencies. For everyone but the students—who could spend up to four more hours a day in school—the proposal is popular. And if it isn’t, you can rest assured that Luna will want to hear about it—even from the students.

These words might seem strange coming from a dancer, but straddling worlds and identities is standard practice for Quijada, 34, who grew up in the predominantly Hispanic Baldwin Park neighborhood of Los Angeles but now lives in Montréal, Canada. And while he got his start break dancing on the streets in the 1980s, he also boasts a command of classical ballet and contemporary dance. Today, as the artistic director and choreographer for RUBBER-BANDance Group (RBDG), a Montréal-based company he founded in 2002, Quijada is melding all those experiences into a new dance form—a new language of movement.

Quijada’s dance journey—even the name of his troupe-—is rooted in his days as a “b-boy” (or break boy, for break dancing). His elastic style earned him the nickname “rubberband” at age eight. He later attended the L.A. County High School for the Arts, where he was introduced to formal art and dance and remembers being inspired by postmodernists like Picasso and Dalí. He also cites his peers as major influences. “I was around all these adolescents who really believed they could change the world,” he recalls. “It was an incredible awakening.”

Two years after graduating, Quijada joined the Twyla Tharp dance company in New York, and later Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, where he mastered the techniques of classical ballet and became increasingly drawn to choreography. He also reconnected with hip-hop.

Quijada created the RUBBER-BANDance Group to develop techniques that bridge the urban and classical worlds. In particular, Quijada wanted to experiment with traditional notions of gravity, applying the horizontal and inverted forms of break dance to ballet. And he didn’t limit himself to ballet and hip-hop: RBDG’s choreography also incorporates movements from martial arts and yoga.

Despite his attention to dance theory, Quijada doesn’t think of his work as abstract or only for elite audiences. Rather, he wants to bring the immediacy and spontaneity of hip-hop into theatrical performance. “I first came to dance in a basement—there was no fourth wall,” he explains, referring to the imaginary wall of separation between performers and their audience. Quijada actively works to break down that barrier. In Punto Ciego, a piece created in 2008, characters speak directly to the audience and present a single story from multiple perspectives, compelling audiences to assemble the narrative themselves.

Another way Quijada connects with audiences is through storytelling. The company’s latest work, Gravity of Center, narrates the evolving relationships among five dancers as they are pulled between conflicting instincts to assimilate within a group and rebel as individuals.

Gravity of Center premiered in April 2011, at the Place des Arts in Montréal, where Quijada has been artist in residence for the past four years. RBDG will take it on tour to Europe in fall 2011 and to the U.S. after that. A short-film version of the piece is also currently being produced, and will premiere at film festivals and on the Canadian cable television arts channel Bravo! this fall.