The Chilean respondents’ stories repeatedly began with grandparents and parents coming from north and south.40 As I have previously shown, given the tidal wave of European immigrants arriving by ship, the Argentine respondents even embrace
40 Santiago Valley is situated in the centre of Chile.
World War stories. By contrast, stories about migration, for the majority of the Chilean respondents, refer to migration from the provinces to the capital, arriving by train or mule.
Marcela for instance told the story of her old grandmother coming from the south, remarking on her roots: “My grandmother was from the south. She was Mapuche.41 She was of course half Mapuche and half Spanish.” The adverbial reference ‘of course’ might indicate either an assumption that to be Chilean is to be ‘mestizo’ (half indigenous-half Spanish) or Claudia’s emphasis on having not only indigenous heirs (also claiming ‘white European’ roots). Leonardo also recounted his grandfather’s (triumphal) migration, preserving traces and scents of a distant past:
“My grandfather turned into a wage earner with a permanent contract, living in a good neighbourhood in Concepción (RF: an historical university Southern city). Since that was a period when there was public education, my father was enrolled in the Liceo Concepción, one of the best Chilean public schools. He was a very talented student and enrolled at the Medical School of the Universidad de Concepción. He completed his studies and moved to Las Condes (RF: an upper-class district in Santiago). In that way, in just one generation, my family had access to welfare standards that they had never had.” (Leonardo, 1971)
Chilean family memories frequently show such internal displacement: migration from the provinces to the capital, from the countryside to the city. Even great parts of modern Santiago were still rural areas forty years ago. For some respondents, their childhood memories still include dirt roads, farms and vegetable plots, as well as livestock pastures. For Sergio, who grew up in a southern part of Santiago (Puente Alto), the first ten years of his life are situated in green, rural areas.
Sergio was born in 1972 and his parents constantly told him that he was born in a period of democracy and freedom. He was born when Salvador Allende was in his second year of government, attempting to build ‘the Chilean road to socialism’.
Sergio did not have any personal memories of such a political project. His first impressions are of the era of the military regime. Similarly Patricio, born on 11 September 1972, has no memories of the communist government. On the same date in 1973, a coup d’état overthrew Allende’s government. Patricio remembers on every
41 Mapuche are native residents of the southern territory, including southern Argentina.
They resisted Spanish colonialism and, during the nineteenth century, the Chilean army.
Violent conflicts over territory and recognition are ongoing.
birthday how his old aunt raised a flag outside their house in order to celebrate the military regime, at least on his first 17 birthdays – the span of Pinochet’s regime.
Both Allende’s death – he killed himself on 11 September 1973 – as well as the beginning of the military regime establish a historical boundary (i.e. a historical setting which marks the beginning of their narratives) for this age cohort. The Chilean putsch took place two and a half years before the Argentine dictatorship began. The military junta comprised the three branches of the armed forces (navy, air force and army) and the police, yet powerfully led by the commander-in-chief of the army, Augusto Pinochet.
There were few personal memories of such an event, just family accounts. For Sergio’s parents, the coup d’état signifies a long period of suppression of democracy;
and for Marcela’s parents, it was a time of alarm and fear as they were active in the communist party. Luckily, they were not ‘mortally’ affected.
Neither was Ignacio’s family affected by the communist government. His father, from the moderate right, was working for a private bank and had never queued for food.
The queue crystallizes Allende’s government economic management, the ‘time of scarcity’. Cristina, born in 1968, did remember queuing for food, yet she believes that
‘high social castes’ were blocking food redistribution.
The Allende and Pinochet eras strongly divide contemporary Chilean memories of the last forty years (M.A Garretón 2003, Huneeus 2003, Manzi et al. 2004), representing a Cold War division in which clear cultural boundaries were drawn. As Steve Stern has stated (2004): here emerged stories of salvation – a country rescued from communism and scarcity – versus a story of rupture and persecution in which the burden of exile, torture and desaparecidos is recounted. Nonetheless, both stories appear in a different light today. After forty years my respondents seem to keep their distance from those strong narrative templates. None of the interviewees entirely believed in the ‘memory of salvation’, as some of their parents or relatives did (nobody referred to the dictatorship as ‘pronunciamiento’ – military uprising – as military adherents used to do). Nobody could deny the crimes against humanity perpetrated in those times, although only one of my respondents knew (approximately) the number of victims.
Differences in what is remembered become much subtler when one contrasts Sergio’s and Marcela’s stories of the putsch as the end of democratic government with Ignacio’s and Patricio’s stories of the end of the scarcity experienced during the communist period. As an enduring cultural code, old boundaries emerge by predicating Allende’s government as either democratic/socialist (positive code) or communist (negative code).
Furthermore, the putsch is always represented as a historical rupture, thereby drawing an absolute distinction between before and after. In contrast to Argentina’s stories, Chilean grandparents’ and parents’ historical circumstances (i.e. before the seventies) were barely recollected in order to describe or evaluate their own stories.
Apart from a few remarks (e.g. Leonardo’s story about his grandparents situated in the period of public education and Sergio’s narrative about his father‘s positive memories of former governments – the ‘radicals’ and Frei’s period), it seems that Chilean respondents mostly ‘forget’ such periods – and not only regarding the dictatorship as is usually thought. The ‘forgotten’ time corresponds to the period of widespread (state-activated) popular mobilization (M.A. Garretón et al. 2003). This period is characterised by a strong state-oriented economy that contrasts to the project of economic liberalization initiated by the dictatorship. Certainly, people do not remember such analytical phases or make such sociological distinctions.
However, what is noteworthy is the absence of communication (family accounts) and cultural figures (images, rituals, spaces, popular texts) amongst my interviewees when recalling this period.
To be sure, the Chilean dictatorship was not more ‘traumatic’ than the Argentine experience. Neither were the stories behind both difficult pasts irrelevant for understanding the historical denouncement. If the Argentinean respondents encapsulated the historical past by means of a long sequence of political and economic events (from Perón’s government in the forties through a variety of authoritarian regimes), this was due to different memory frames. Indeed, the absence of such a period was partly provoked by the military regime when reviving the nineteenth century nationalistic story and negatively denoting earlier periods (see 4.2 below). Moreover, the political opposition (left-wing parties) also narrate memories of the putsch as an absolute break and Allende’s government as a traumatic political defeat (Hite 2000).
All in all, the coup d’état has always been narrated as a dramatic turning point, leaving behind a historical boundary beyond which more distant historical pasts fade away.