Minor Characters: Childhood in Pinochet’s Chile in Fiction and Film

Drawing on productive dialogues with cultural studies, this paper takes as its subject the shifting terrain of historical narratives about the Pinochet dictatorship in contemporary Chilean fiction, documentary film, and television drama. By 2010, the year of Chile’s bicentennial, the dictatorship had become a topic for mainstream cultural productions with mass audience appeal, as reflected in the production of two television dramas: “Los Archivos del Cardenal” and “Los 80: Más que una moda.” I argue that these programs form part of a broader generational shift over how to narrate Chile’s recent past. The creative talent behind them belongs to a generation of Chilean writers and filmmakers who came of age during the dictatorship.

Born between 1970 and 1975, the “children of the dictatorship” are increasingly reclaiming the past from their parents for whom September 11, 1973, marked an irrevocable rupture. Much has been written about the competing memory narratives of the military coup and their purchase among different sectors of Chilean society. By contrast, the cultural productions by this younger generation foreground their childhood experiences in the 1980s.  By casting themselves as minor characters in a grown-up drama, they reveal the extent to which daily life was, at times, only obliquely informed by the dictatorship. By emphasizing their own subjectivity, they reveal the importance of the individual act of narration as part of a collective story. Finally, this paper situates the contemporary reception of these memory narratives about the 1980s at a moment when Chile’s “children of democracy” –that generation born after 1990—claimed center stage as political actors in an unfolding national drama.