Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lessie Jo Frazier is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is a coeditor of Gender's Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America.

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"The modern Chilean state has been linked to violence since its inception, despite official historiography's assertion that the 1973 coup and the Pinochet regime that followed were 'aberrations' in an otherwise democratic order favoring peace. Lessie Jo Frazier illuminates the competing uses of the past across cultural, racial, and class lines. Through her brilliant analysis of memory as a dynamic category employed by clashing collectivities, Frazier demonstrates how the use of memory in post-dictatorial regimes is not in and of itself liberating or new, but rather modeled on previous historical instances of remembering and forgetting."--Licia Fiol-Matta, author of "A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral"

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Salt in the Sand

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments...............................................................................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION Ethnography, History, and Memory................................................................................................11 Memory and the Camanchacas Calientes of Chilean Nation-State Formation.....................................................................212 Structures of Memory, Shapes of Feeling: Chronologies of Reminiscence and Repression in Tarapac (1890-Present)............................583 Dismantling Memory: Structuring the Forgetting of the Oficina Ramrez (1890-1891) and La Corua (1925) Massacres...........................854 Song of the Tragic Pampa: Structuring the Remembering of the Escuela Santa Mara Massacre (1907)...........................................1175 Conjunctures of Memory: The Detention Camps in Pisagua Remembered (1948, 1973, 1990) and Forgotten (1943, 1956, 1984).....................1586 The Melancholic Economy of Reconciliation: Talking with the Dead, Mourning for the Living..................................................190CONCLUSION Democratization and Arriving at the "End of History" in Chile......................................................................243Notes.........................................................................................................................................261Selective Bibliography........................................................................................................................355Index.........................................................................................................................................365

Chapter One

In May 1991, during my stay in Santiago, Chile had just entered the second year of a shift to formal democracy. This shift, officially termed "the transition," moved Chile from the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet, which had ruled since the 1973 coup, toward an elected coalition of political parties, despite the fact that the new civilian regime operated under the scrutiny of the former dictator and the military he still controlled. Political tensions had been exacerbated by the assassination of Jaime Guzmn, a major ideologue in the former military regime, a prominent senator, and a law professor; Guzmn had crafted both the terms of transition between regimes and the baroque constitution, which was designed to protect and institutionalize the prerogatives of those who had ruled earlier and to constrain the initiatives of those who sought to mold a new political system. Guzmn's murder had prompted the nervous new civilian government, eager to demonstrate its ability to maintain law and order, to permit police raids of shantytowns and mass detention of "suspects." To the horror of those who had held great hope for the new government, the murder served as the government's justification for unleashing the state's repressive forces in all-too-familiar ways.

As I walked late one evening through a downtown pedestrian mall, a group of young folk musicians were performing for passersby and an audience of about fifty that had gathered around them. Dressed in alpaca ponchos and blue jeans, the folk musicians played several pieces of Andean music on panpipes, guitars, charangos, and drums. In the middle of their street-corner set, the musicians announced their next song by noting the ongoing police raids and stating: "Today our government is in crisis over the death of one rich man. Here is a song about the deaths of many." To audience applause, which grew even more enthusiastic as they recognized the first notes, the group performed the opening movement of Santa Mara de Iquique: Cantata popular (commonly known as "Cantata Santa Mara de Iquique") a familiar retelling of the government's 1907 massacre of striking nitrate workers in Tarapac, two thousand kilometers away at the northern frontier.

How do such memories of repression shape collective subjectivities? In this case, the street performers employed music instantly recognizable to many in their audience; this music, in turn, elicited an emotional response based on collective memories of the original incident and its linkage to new instances of repression and also on memories of prior performances of the memory-form itself, in other words, this particular music. The cantata had emerged from the New Song Movement of the 1960s, in which artists reinterpreted folk melodies and genres in order to create and validate the political category of "the people," bearers of an authentic national culture and thus legitimate claimants to state power and economic resources. After the military coup of 1973, many of the movement's artists were killed or exiled and their music banned. Nonetheless, those exiled artists performed their music worldwide, working to isolate the military regime internationally and to generate support for opposition groups within Chile. During the years of dictatorship (1973-1990), many in the opposition used the events and characters of the long-ago Tarapac massacre portrayed in the cantata as an allegory for the more recent military overthrow of the Popular Unity government that had governed Chile in 1970-1973, an allegory that vindicated Popular Unity's attempts to enact a gradual socialist transformation of the state, despite its having been declared a failure by the military dictatorship and by many civilian politicians as well.

Thus it was that in the constricted and delicate political arena of transition from military to civilian rule, I witnessed street musicians calling on memories of state violence, connecting through analogy the Tarapac strikers of 1907 and the residents of Santiago's poorer neighborhoods who in 1991 were being politically harassed. By playing the cantata, the musicians implicated the current civilian government as comparable to the repressive Chilean state that had existed more than eighty years earlier. This parallel is surprisingly absent in professional histories of Chile, which either deal with times before or after, but not during, the 1973 coup, thus reinforcing the notion that the post-1973 violence was an aberration in the nation's otherwise democratic history. Memory, for all its complexities, is a useful analytic category because it places the historical observations of professionals alongside those of street musicians and reveals both to be political interventions. Thus, one can take as a serious proposition the connection made by the street musicians and their audience between the two moments of state violence as being about the ways in which the state secures certain interests at the expense of others.

The musicians' critical analogy demonstrated the political vulnerability of the new civilian government. Although the government had won the electoral contest against the military regime by speaking a language of justice and had identified itself as advocating for a...