Home Alone in Pinochet’s Chile: Memories of Adolescence under Authoritarianism

This paper examines peer-to-peer relationships that developed between young people growing up during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). Widespread unemployment followed by the massive entry of women into the workforce signaled a transformation in family dynamics that was unprecedented in living memory. How did families navigate this care deficit? For the first time, many middle-class children found themselves home alone. Drawing on memoirs and fiction, I examine the absence of parents from these narratives of youth alienation and emergent counterculture. Contemporary cultural productions by the “hijos de la dictadura” tend to privilege more affluent children’s experiences across the political spectrum and reproduce a silence around the experiences of children living in poverty in sprawling working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns. While the absence of parents from the home was not a new experience for working-class teens, their lives also dramatically changed after the military coup. Drawing on oral histories with teenagers from Catholic youth groups in southern Chile, I examine how these young people reacted to the absence of their former leaders—the parish priest detained after the coup and the university student activists who abandoned the neighborhood to go underground and avoid arrest. In response, these teenagers organized to maintain basic community services during the economic recession, most significantly, taking charge of the care, education, and entertainment of younger children within the neighborhood. I highlight how life under an authoritarian regime produced new kinds of interpersonal relationships between adolescents and children. Drawing on previous Catholic and leftist political organizing practices, these young people forged new spaces of community that sought not only to shield younger children from the most ferocious side of political and economic violence, but also to generate autonomous spaces of reflection that allowed a community to process the experience of dictatorship as it was happening.