“I Don’t Like to Ask Names, and I Never Remember Anything”: Narratives of Violence, Resistance, and Justice in Poblaciones of Gran Santiago, 1973–2013

Using oral history to place people and the communities they created at the center of historical analysis allows for a closer look at the struggle for democracy and human rights on the ground, far from grand narratives, neat schematics, and clichés about the period of dictatorship and democratization. The intersections of past and present in these narratives present myriad challenges to all involved.  What truths could be told about the dictatorship, and the risks associated with their telling, were matters of contention in poblaciones (poor and working-class neighborhoods) in the early twenty-first century, in part because of their emphasis on continuity between the dictatorship (1973-1990) and the Concertación (1990-2010). Such narratives highlight the gradual and continuous unfolding of “memory struggles”[i]that occur below the radar of official discourse and media attention by virtue of their location in poblaciones, their timing—which may place them out of sync with dominant politico-cultural trends—and the nature of their subject matter. While oral history conversations tell us about the past, they also open windows onto the present.  This paper explores the question of interpretation of oral history narratives produced in poblaciones of Gran Santiago in the early twenty-first century, before the outbreak of student protest brought discussion of political repression, socioeconomic injustice, and continuities between dictatorship and democracy into mainsteam discourse.

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[i] I borrow the term “memory struggles” from Steve J. Stern’s trilogy, “The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile.”

See more of: Memory Studies and the Historian: Cases from Chile under Augusto Pinochet to the Present
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