La Memoria

Heartbeats. Fast, aching, thudding, fluttering, skipping. This last week was my most intense, a fusion of experience and emotion. During classes, we were reminded of the deep, bleeding pain that Chile carries, and we ended the week with an excursion to Santiago where we walked through some scars of the dictatorship. Afterwards, I could not have switched gears more drastically as a gaggle of us put on our dancing pants for a whole weekend of Chile's first full-scale international music festival, Lollapalooza.

La Memoria:
The collective memory of the dictatorship in Chile is delicate and strong.* It laces its way through the population, itching some and gripping others. Multiple times since being here I have heard, "We don't want to forget, but we want to move on." And even with my Spanish, I have caught an undertone of, We want to forget, and we want to move on. Many others find an importance in remembering, recording, recounting, and do so in order to ensure the same atrocities never happen again.

I met a man who paints. Graffiti and canvas. Block letters surround his figures and many times, if you piece them together they say Memoria. He says memory takes on many meanings in Spanish -- individual, collective, story, history, identity, culture.

Inti

This past week we saw many grim memories in different forms. We watched them and heard them and felt a miniscule fraction of them. Although as a gringa I will never fully understand the intricate combination of Chile's past and present and the feelings attached to both, I got a valuable reminder of how recently Chile has experienced mass restriction, murder, torture, and disappearance. Whether a Chilean will not talk about it, will talk if asked, or will volunteer information freely, s/he lives in it's heritage.

You might recall my recent documentary addiction. Last week this addiction was fed in class with a heavy spoonful of history. La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos was really moving and about a group of photographers that documented the streets and protests during the dictatorship. I definitely recommend it if you can find it. My heart pounded while watching a group of photographers swooping over a boy whose eye just got bashed out by a policeman. My heart ached while watching an old woman light candles on a shrine made for her children that had disappeared in the 1970's. Forever remaining in their 20's on their mourning mother's mantles, their bones might never be found.

Machuca

La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos

          


We also watched the Chilean classic, Machuca, about two boys of different classes becoming friends right before the military coup. Watch it and cry. And learn a lot too.

On Friday, we went to Santiago. We arrived at a beautiful gated park in the city and broke into excited English in little clusters as if we hadn't just all ridden one and a half hours together. Suddenly the mood changed as one of our leaders, usually the jokester, told us sternly and earnestly, "No English here, please"* and gathered us to explain where we were. We, or at least I, had not realized the intensity of our excursion before arriving. Villa Grimaldi, which is now a memorial park, had been a main interrogation and torture center during Pinochet's dictatorship. For the next couple hours we walked around mostly quiet, shaking our heads, crossing our arms in discomfort, eyes wide as we learned what had happened on the grounds we were walking on. The most incredible part of the experience was that a woman -- the woman that had organized our day with the Mapuches and had been around Casa SIT -- unexpectedly came in front of us and without wavering, shared her story of being detained there at Villa Grimaldi. In realative terms, she is lucky to not have ended up in the bottom of the ocean and to have not become a desaparecida. Even so, my heart squirmed and threatened to jump out of my chest, or sink into my stomach, when she spoke about being shoved into a tiny closet-sized "house" with four other women for three days while children of soldiers played in a pool across the yard, about horribly invading electrocutions, about her companions hanged from trees.

Before leaving, we were told that if anyone claimed that the torture of the dictatorship was a figment of the left's imagination, we knew differently. It is a true memory.




*I know I'm a history major, but I don't have it in me to describe all of Chile's, so if you're not familiar with it, you gotta open up another window in wikipedia
*You'd think this would be a given considering it's a Spanish program....but it's really hard to not speak English with 20 students who not only speak English but get along so well that they always want to chat chat chat