Longing For a " Beautiful Chile: " Interactions Between Neoliberalism and Historical Memory in Post Dictatorship Social Mobilizations (original) (raw)

Building Disagreements: Memory and Political Subjectivation of Second Generation Activists in Post-dictatorship Chile

This paper looks at the production of political subjectivation of second generation activist through the stories and memories of their families' previous political involvement. This process is described as an emotional link that is established between his/hers family narrative and his/hers own subjectivity. For this purpose, this paper begins by criticizing what is understood as a general top-down perspective of mainstream social movement theory to then proposing subjectivation as an approach that considers both the lived experiences and the social and political environment of their mobilization.

The Post-dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Collective Memory and Cultural Production

2012

("For sample chapter and browsing see: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=530423). In this project I reflect on how the Southern Cone postdictatorship generations reshape the collective memory of the dictatorial past through political activism and forms of artistic expression (cinema, literature, comics and photography). I situate their work at the intersection of the individual and the collective: it helps artists and activists elaborate traumatic events individually but it also has a profound impact at the collective level, and it is enabled by changes in the political context. Collective memory and intergenerational transmissions are key concepts for understunding these generations' emergence and contributions. The first part of my study focuses on Argentina, where this generation’s public interventions have broadened social involvement in remembering the past and encouraged learning from it for the sake of the present. In that respect, this generation’s participation is instrumental in achieving an “exemplary memory” in Todorov’s terms: a memory that allows us to draw lessons from the past in order to actively deal with abuses and social conflict in the present, and deciding which kind of society we want to live in. In the second part, I compare the exemplary achievements in Argentina with Chile and Uruguay, where political conditions are less conducive to genuine debate. The book is written for teaching, research and a non-academic readership."

"The living bond of generations" The narrative construction of post-dictatorial memories in Argentina and Chile

2015

This dissertation aims to understand how people connect their biographies with historical and recent collective events. Through the concept of generational narratives, life-stories of individuals born after dramatic periods of political violence in Argentina and Chile, are examined. By recounting two generations’ stories in two post-dictatorial countries, political paths, economic divergences, and cultural differences are disclosed. In these contexts, collective memories of and processes of coming to terms with those difficult pasts are entangled in periods of neoliberal economic transformation, political polarization as well as youth mobilization. Every ‘generational site’ brings to the fore a narrative plot which encompasses past events and present processes of meaning attribution. The investigation shed lights on Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of ‘the living bond of generations’, i.e., how past and present times are lively connected through generational bonds, memories and stories.

Remembering Pinochet: Chile's Contested Memories of the Dictatorship

My thesis will examine how Chileans of different social, ethnic, and political backgrounds remember the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973 to 1990 and how the events and memories of that time period are contested. My paper will also examine secondary memories by looking at how Chileans who were not alive during the Pinochet regime remember the dictatorship. In order to gain a thorough understanding of how Chileans remember the Pinochet regime and how Chile should move towards reconciliation I conducted extensive interviews with a variety of Chileans about these topics and also visited numerous memorial sights within Chile.

Multitude & Memory in Chile's Social Uprising

South American Quarterly, 2024

Ricardo is a thirty-eight-year-old emergency medical technician from Santiago. During the 2019 social uprising, he lived in a central neighborhood close to the epicenter of the protests. He worked at a local clinic attached to a public university, where student protests and clashes between masked demonstrators and police were common. Ricardo comes from a right-wing family: only he and his sister have left-wing leanings. He has never been a member of a political party, group, or organization, and in fact he expresses mistrust of them, and of Chilean politics in general. However, the neighborhood he lived in as a child bordered on another, Villa Francia, which has a long history of political and community organizing and is considered a combative place. Ricardo used to go there to get involved in protests on emblematic days.1 A few years ago, he began to take part on and off in a musical troupe that often appears at popular street events and commemorations of September 11, the date of Pinochet’s coup d’état. In Ricardo’s account, two main hermeneutical and agential phenomena configured the uprising as a critical event with the capacity for political subjectivation.2 First, Ricardo’s identification of the revolt as a historical event from his own lifetime, as he drew parallels between the social uprising and the 1973–90 dictatorship, the biggest sociopolitical catastrophe of Chile’s recent history. Second, the power of the masses in public demonstrations, which activated Ricardo’s desire and spurred him on to a total and systematic immersion in the front line of the protests,3 evoking memories of the urban street fights he knew in his childhood. Once the dictatorship was over, Ricardo and his friends had repeatedly asked themselves, “What would I have done if I’d been there?” Faced with the social uprising, at first an unintelligible event, Ricardo returns to, and brings into the present, that generation-specific question: “Where am I going to be now?” His response rose to the occasion: an extraordinary level of immersion in, and by means of, street combat. The memory of the anti-dictatorship movement, the power of the spontaneous masses, and the street as a place of encounter and struggle will activate Ricardo’s political subjectivation, and the configuration of the uprising as a critical event, one that he interprets in the light of the past. Some academic accounts of Chile’s social uprising refer to the “irruption of memories” through this protest cycle. These may be long-standing memories—such as of the violence visited on the Mapuche people4 by the Chilean state—memories of the feminist or neighborhood movements, and/ or memories of the recent dictatorship (Angelcos and Pérez 2017; Vivaldi and Sepúlveda 2021; Garcés 2019; Han 2012). Certainly, the repressive policing of the protests, and the decreeing of “states of exception” revived memories of the dictatorship the length and breadth of the country. The protests became places of commemoration and homage to victims of dictatorship-era violence, and spaces in which to denounce remaining gaps in truth and justice. The demands that inspired the uprising also referred back to the period of the political transition (1990s), which had first denounced the legacy of the neoliberal societal model imposed at gunpoint under the military regime. The relationship between these memorialization practices and new processes of political subjectivation however remains unexplored, above all among actors who do not belong to political and protest movements such as the student, feminist, or environmental movements (Bravo and Pérez 2022). In this context, Ricardo’s case demonstrates the intergenerational staying power of certain subterranean memories in the trajectories of people who either did not live through the dictatorship or lived it as children and do not have a history of activism or involvement in social organizations. Decades later, during the social uprising, memories of resistance to the dictatorship evoked an ethical imperative in this ordinary citizen. Ricardo experiences this as a form of duty to his time and to his own history. This experience blurs the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics, as it becomes the engine of mobilization and a desire for social transformation not through political militancy or trajectories, but rather in unexpected and sudden awakenings and agency arrangements.

Obstinate Memory: Working Class Politics and Neoliberal Forgetting in the UK and Chile

Memory Studies, 2022

In the forty years since Chile and the UK became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled, and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertaçion, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogenous time’. This paper explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this “presentism”: the 1973 coup in Chile, and the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in the UK. We argue that the use of “living history” or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity, and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism.

Multitude and Memory in the Chilean Social Uprising

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2024

Between October 2019 and March 2020 Chile experienced the most massive and heavily repressed cycle of social protests in its post-dictatorship (1973–90) history. This essay explores the social uprising as a critical event of political subjectivation through the story of Ricardo, an ordinary young medical technician with no background of political affiliation who fully immersed himself in the forefront of confrontation with the police in the ground zero protest zone, while also providing first-aid assistance to those injured. Two vectors triggering Ricardo's unexpected and sudden transformation into an activist are identified: the intergenerational potency of antidictatorial memories and the power of the spontaneous multitude in demonstration. In recalling the dictatorship, Ricardo and his friends used to ask themselves, “What would I have done if I'd been there?” In the face of the social uprising, Ricardo brings to the present that generation-specific question and responds with total exposure, defending the multitude and healing the wounded. We argue that the event's critical nature is interpreted in the light of the past. Ricardo's involvement becomes an ethical imperative to his time and to his own history. This duty fuels his mobilization and desire for social transformation, blurring the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics.

Co-Constitution and Renewal: The Material and the Symbolic Dimensions of Neoliberal Domination in Chile, 1973-2016

Relying on a critical cultural political economy approach (CCPE), this paper shows how the past four decades of Chilean history can best be understood by examining the interaction between the material and semiotic dimensions. Analyzing the shifting and mutually-constitutive interaction between material (structural) and semiotic (meaning-making) practices is crucial for assessing (1) continuities and ruptures enacted by center-left Concertación (1990-2009) and the Nueva Mayoría administrations (2014-2018); (2) debates about how Chile's "progressive" public policies shift the boundaries between the commodified and non-commodified realms of social life; and (3) possible outcomes to the crises of legitimacy and representation currently afflicting Chile's political and economic institutions. Using a critical cultural political economy approach (CCPE), I examine the major transformations experienced by Chilean society over the past four decades and draw implications for contemporary struggles to reform economic, social and political structures. The analysis presented here suggests the urgency of developing a more comprehensive definition of "neoliberalism," one more attentive to the articulations among the accumulation of capital, hegemonic practices and the production of subjectivity.