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How do you find a voice when society censors you? How do you find a voice when, as a woman, you are not able to feel empowered by a very, very patriarchal society? How do you find a voice when you have been victimized? And yet they found a voice. And I think, if you ask me, what is the most important thing about arpilleras, it's the ability of people who have been victimized to tell their own story.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Chile is a country stretching narrowly along the western coast of South America. In 1970, a new movement came to power in Chile. The country elected President Salvador Allende, who inspired a whole generation with hopes for deep social and democratic reforms. But he was met with a harsh backlash and was overthrown in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet violently ended 130 years of imperfect but democratic tradition and replaced it with 17 years of military dictatorship. During the Pinochet reign, tens of thousands of people were abducted, interrogated, and tortured. Over 3,000 people vanished without a trace. Thus began the long and painful search of thousands of wives, sisters, and mothers for Chile's disappeared sons.

It was a time of silence, of fear, of empty streets, of curfews, of bombs in the middle of the night. But the fear was not-- at the beginning was visible. People were detained. Men that had long hair were immediately shaven in a public place. But the fear then transformed to something that I consider more danger, was the invisible fear.

Those that you trusted were no longer trustworthy. The books you always believe you could read and could give you some answers were forbidden. Doors were closed. Nothing was safe. And I think those are the horrors of dictatorship. The uncertainty is so profound that you lose this great concept that we had, which was to be a citizen with rights. I think we became a society of vigilantes, informers, instead of a society of good neighbors.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The people that were targeted were activists from high schools, universities, factories-- mostly those that were supporters of Salvador Allende and who fought for the transformation of society. Then, of course, the mothers of these activists-- because of their relationship to their children, after their children disappeared-- were also targeted. The children were activists, but they were not terrorists. The majority of them never used arms. They were idealistic young people, and that truth that they were murdered without a trial and that they were murdered in a very clandestine way, that their bodies were tortured, that their bodies were thrown into the sea, gave them a tremendous voice.

In 1974, one group of women, many of them mothers of disappeared people, came together to protest the brutal regime and demand the return of their loved ones. The focus of the protests were vivid, hand-stitched quilts that told the sad and gruesome stories of the disappeared. These quilts were called arpilleras, and the women who made them were known as arpilleristas.

I started hearing about the arpilleristas in 1976. I was a graduate student at Indiana University. So we had a visiting lecturer, a very important writer, Antonio Skármeta, who was escaping Santiago on his way to Berlin. He had, in his little portfolio suitcase, one single arpillera that he had folded. And he opened it to the classroom.

I was very young, coming from a very idealistic family, and I became so mesmerized by this because it touched my heart, it was poignant, it was portable, it told a story. And I, as a young graduate student, said, this is what I want to do. I want to study this. I want to learn more about it.

So I just went and knocked at the door of the main office of the Catholic Church. And in 1974, they had formed a very special committee called Pro-Peace Committee and Vicariate of Solidarity, which was to help the victims of the Pinochet terror. And Raúl Silva Henríquez, a very important human rights figure in the Church, set up this committee to protect victims. And I knew that the arpilleristas met there. These mothers, before they made the arpilleras, found themselves searching together in similar places like tribunals of justice, hospitals, and morgues. And they began to recognize each other and then collectively went to seek help to the Vicariate of Solidarity and to denounce the disappearances of their children.

If they knew that in a particular house in downtown Santiago called Londres 33, which happens to be a torture center, now a museum, were torturing people. They went home, made the initial stitching of the arpilleras, the arpillera that speaks about torture. Then they brought these arpilleras to the Vicariate of Solidarity. And then in the evening, they went into a street demonstration.

They worked together. They were empowered by the communal experience. They went to protest, to the streets in front of the torture centers, in front of hospitals. They used to chain themselves in front of the former tribunals of Congress. The central issue for them was the search for their missing children.

It was '77, '78. Around '79, '80, the missing children became a very central part of the arpillera itself, but the women realized that they will never find their children. And none of those women that I met, that I interviewed, that I became friends, ever found out where their children are.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So the search for a loved one was always linked to the search for beauty or to the search for making art or denouncing what has happened. It was-- their lives and their art was inseparable. And this is why, in the arpillera itself, they may use clothing of the deceased, a piece of hair that they had saved from the child. Uniforms in Chile are very light blue like the sky. In order to create the sky, they used their children's shirts. And it's an art that doesn't have divisions between the life of an artist and the life of an ordinary citizen. It all merges into one with incredible force.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

They found a voice through art. And they found their voice, is something I think a lot, through the power of the human hand. We live in such a global world where everything is manufactured through machinery. But the human hand, the construction of the story, stitching piece by piece, a life-- but not an ordinary life, but a life that has been cut off.

I learned from them about empathy, compassion, commitment. But I also learned something that I think is so lacking in our society, which is to put oneself in somebody else's shoes, to deeply engage with the life of another human being. And not only a human being that suffers, but your own neighbor, your own son, daughter, wife-- the whole fabric of society.

It's a very complex question-- what gives people strength? What gives people the power to say, enough? What gave them the strength was truth. That simple and that complex.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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The Arpilleras of Chile (with Marjorie Agosin)

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Marjorie Agosin discusses women's artistic response to Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile.

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Pull one way/method/image/story that Fernández uses to organize and think through memory in her work Voyager. (For example, brain scans, specific constellations, etc.)

1) Copy the passage

2) Pull an image to illustrate this idea

3) Write 1-2 paragraphs of analysis / your own thougths

4) Comment on another classmate's or group's post

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The theory of invisbile fear and not being able to trust who you could before was interesting- Kailin

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The protest of mothers for their missing children was intriguing because they would literally chain themselves together - Kailin

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1.) I liked the moment when the speaker talked about her experience in grad school when the professor brought in an arpillera. How seeing it in-person and hearing about the tragedy caused to take a stand and get involved in anyway she could even though she wasn't from Chile.

2.) Even after they made the arpilleras they still all went out in groups to protest the dictatorship. In the readings, there was more focus on the secret meetings, while in the video they emphasized some of the more visible activism outside of torture centers and hospitals.

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Riley - The idea of them chaining themselves to buildings was really special to me and reminds me of other moments in history where the people of a government want their needs to be heard. Also, the way the police officers reacted to violently reminds me a lot of American history, and shows we have parallels between the two nations.

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Allende really wanted a true Democracy that was not controlled by businesses or agricultural elites. He wanted to ensure the well-beings of all citizens. He wanted to give expropriated land to poor agrarian laborers, mandate low food prices, and make the minimum wage higher. He also advocated for better education for the poor.

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Allende's vision included helping the poor, laborers, and getting the country back to democracy.

"Suburban right-wing women who opposed Allende organized the dramatic "March of the Empty Pots," parading through Santiago while banging their empty cooking pots to protest food shortages".

-Kailin

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"The group that carried out the systematic persecution of MIR activists was the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence Directorate, called the DINA), Pinochet’s secret police. Created shortly after the coup and led by a notorious general named Manuel Contreras, the organization carried out its mandate to collect intelligence about subversives by abducting, torturing, and murdering thousands of men and women," (p. 14)

"It sealed all media outlets,

suspended all political parties, and

destroyed any group that dissented," (p. 13).

The dictatorship was run by a militaristic force that used fear and distrust to prevent as much protest as possible. They targeted people political involvement or those accused of political involvement along with their families and friends.

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Allende's vision is to bring hope and democracy back to the nation of Chile. It is explained that the most impactful way this can be done was through the creation of the arpiller movement, and the existence of the arpiller as a whole is seen as a step forward towards making the nation's demands be met. "I believe that the spirit of justice and

fortitude created at the birth of the arpillera

movement almost 30 years ago is still

very much alive in today’s Chile, where a

woman who was once tortured and exiled

rules the country with a sense of unity and

a profound belief that in order to forge a

decent future Chileans must remember

their grim past. " - Riley

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Allende's vision was to transition to socialism and deepen democracy in Chile. "He believed that the duty of democratic societies was to ensure the well-being of all citizens and that the poor must take an active role." He wanted total freedom of the press and information and tolerance and respect for all creeds. He drew up a plan that included "nationalizing mines and industries, donating expropriated land to poor agrarian laborers, mandating low prices for food staples, and increasing the minimum wage." He drew up this plan along with other measures to ensure better housing and education for the poor. - Kaitlyn, Eden, Becky

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"Turning to the folk art of embroidery, they found their voice: in brilliant arpilleras (tapestries), they told the stories of the disappeared and of other victims of the military dictatorship. With the helping hand of the Roman Catholic church, these tapestries were smuggled out of Chile and bore witness around the world to the plight of the dead and the missing" (Page 20) - Riley

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"What's the difference between dream and memory? Is there some boundary separating the two? Some territory they don't share? Basted together with threads of air sliced apart with the delicate edge of a scalpel. Volatile, muddled, capricious, so easy to confuse and entangle that maybe there's no point drawing distinctions," (p. 38)

The narrator is using her dream to reconnect to her memories of her passed relatives. It's mentioned in a similar section how the dream recreates her relatives image and voice better than her memory ever could. In her connection between dreams and memories, dreams serve as a deeper connection between the subconscious and deeper memories that may be lost somewhere in our brains. Since it was the dream that predicated the narrator's pregnancy, it is a nod to our subconscious having a deeper connection to our physical body than our conscious mind at times.

To me, this passage really encapsulates the interconnectedness of memory to who we are as people, even what are brain shows us when we sleep. Sleep and dreams are used to help us process memories and so dreams are sort of their own type of memory in a way. So many times me or someone in my family will have a dream and we'll wake up and say how like I'm mad at my sister b/c she did something in my dream and it's something that she totally would do, and that is another layer of of relationship and understanding of our memories and what we know.

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"Repression replaced the most valuable things in a free regime- the institutions and the practices that guarantee citizens the right to conduct their economic, social, and political affairs without fear of government retaliation."

"It sealed all media outlets, suspended all political parties, and destroyed any group that dissented." - Kailin

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Passage, pg 18- "Our body's memory is made up of infinite constellations. Some reside in the cerebral cortex, in full consciousness, but others are hidden in fathomless places. There are actually memories tattooed on our DNA in a language different from the neuronal language of the brain. Stories we carry with us in our genetic makeup without realizing it. We are the sum total of hundreds of millions years of evolution, and the memory of that process is part of us. We apply our evolutionary memory to everything we do. No one teaches us to cry when we come into the world. It's part of our inheritance."

Some images that go along with the explanation of memory are that when we lift a spoon to our mouth, our bodies automatically digest, synthesize enzymes, and extract energy from food, following all the memories of evolution to allow our bodies to function independently.

-Kaitlyn, Eden, Becky

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Imagine a starry night sky, where each star represents a memory, and constellations form patterns that tell stories of relationships, significant life event

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"Beyond photograph and memory, where will we end up? [...] Will this moment be replayable at least one more time in someone else's brain?" (92)

My thoughts on this have me thinking about the concept of why photographs exist in the first place. They're made to keep memories alive. Therefore, even when we are physically gone, decayed in the earth, we will still be engrained in someone's portfolio or gallery, forever memorialized. - Riley