Session Abstract

In a 2001 essay, Steve J. Stern called on historians of Modern Latin America “to consider the tumultuous 1960s-90s period as a whole and to ask how the period will or ought to be remembered.”[1]At the time, Stern presciently observed that struggles over collective memory “will become a key cultural, political, and generational battleground in Latin American life.”[2]  Since that time, memory studies has emerged as a vibrant subfield of history and other disciplines, as well as interdisciplinary professional organizations, including the Latin American Studies Association’s “Memory and Recent History.”

     This panel attempts to answer Stern’s challenge with case studies on Chile under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990), the subsequent transition to democracy, and memory politics in the present day. We discuss approaches to researching sources such as documentary film and television, as well as oral histories that we conduct with local actors and those found in oral archives of grassroots organizations and museums. We ask how we negotiate our roles as historians and interlocutors, especially as we analyze narratives that have been marginalized from “official” history. Our work thus seeks to uncover power relationships that shape the production of knowledge and influence memories of the dictatorship.

     We begin with Alison Bruey’s paper, which explores memory struggles in Santiago’s poblaciones (urban working-class neighborhoods) and occur largely obscured from official discourse and mainstream politico-cultural developments. Bruey shows that speaking about the dictatorship—and continuities with succeeding democratic governments—as well as analyzing those oral histories, present unique risks, but also open new windows into interpreting both the past and present.

     Next, Brandi Townsend examines oral interviews she conducted with former women political prisoners from Valparaíso. These women narrated against expectations of traditional women’s roles, in keeping with feminist ideas that emerged in 1980s Chile. Their narratives, however, which centered on single motherhood and reclaiming broken career paths, upset overarching histories of the dictatorship that have tended to focus on masculine revolutionary heroes and grieving, yet powerful, widows and mothers.

     Claudio Barrientos researches memory from a unique source: oral history archives created by Chilean anthropologists and housed in NGOs. He studies thirty interviews detailing indigenous life histories and narratives about experiences of repression and state violence. Barrientos studies how the anthropological discipline and profession structure and frame these narratives in the context of Chile’s transition to democracy, constraining and sometimes erasing indigenous agency and politics.

     Marian Schlotterbeck finishes the panel with fresh sources. The “children of the dictatorship,” born 1970-1975, told their own stories of the dictatorship through documentary film and television and thereby reclaimed part of that narrative from their parents. Scholtterbeck argues this reflects a larger generational change in recounting Chile’s recent history. She contextualizes these media narratives within the current moment—when children born after 1990 are in the political vanguard.