When a Social Movement Quarantines: The Power of Urban Memory in the 2019 Chilean Anti-neoliberal Uprising

Introduction

On Friday, April 3, 2020, almost six months after the start of one of the most massive social movements in Chile’s history, President Sebastián Piñera stopped at the movement’s most emblematic space: “Plaza Italia”, which the movement renamed “Dignity Square”. Since October 18, 2019, thousands of people have congregated in this square each Friday (Figure 1). But that Friday, the right-wing president, who a few weeks earlier had decreed a state of catastrophe and mandatory quarantine for several municipalities in response to the coronavirus pandemic, toured an empty plaza. He then posed for a photo, sitting solitarily at the monument that had been the space to display the mobilization’s slogans and demands for a new constitution, the end to repression, and his own resignation, among others. That Friday, the city was silent and no one could protest the offensive presence of the president in this place, with one exception: Graffiti inscribed on the monument read, “Piñera go away”.

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Figure 1.

Friday in Dignity Square during the protests.

The social movement that began in October 2019 radically changed the use of urban space, showing the close relationship between space and social movements. The protests quickly won citizen legitimacy, and for more than five months, thousands of people filled the streets with massive demonstrations, marches, performances, and graphic interventions to demand a new constitution and denounce the police repression that left at least 31 dead, more than 285 with eye injuries, and more than 5,558 victims of human rights abuses. ¹ During the months of mobilization, the social movement inscribed its slogans, complaints, and demands on thousands of walls, monuments, and city spaces, building its own memory and identity.

This movement activated a constitutional process that would have its first milestone on April 26, 2020, with a referendum for citizens to decide for or against a new constitution. However, after the advance of the new coronavirus in Chile and the world, the referendum was postponed and the social mobilization also went into quarantine. This urgent measure to control the virus has also turned out to be a measure that drastically restricted the political use of the city, banning multitudinous gatherings and, in some areas, the use of streets.

This article reflects on the effects of quarantine on the continuity of the movement that transformed Chile’s social and political scene, a phenomenon that has halted several social movements around the world, including those in Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Iraq. In particular, it analyzes how spatial control measures, such as traffic restrictions and curfew, as well as the imposition of hygiene measures on infrastructure and social relations, have affected and challenged the movement. Participants have had to find other repertoires of action and conquer other spaces. I maintain that the persistence of the movement in a state of isolation and social distancing will largely depend on the memory that the protesters have registered in the city during these months. ²

A Quarantined Movement: Spatial Measures and Effects

Chilean society was waiting for March to arrive. For protestors, it would be the moment to resume social action after a month in which demonstrations were notably reduced for summer break. For the government, it would be the month to again face public opinion about their repressive control measures. March arrived and on the first Friday, Dignity Square was once more filled with people and the urban space was again marked with barricades, debris, performances, and graphic protests. That day, police again strongly repressed demonstrations.

However, as the coronavirus spread, March started to look different. Media, authorities, civils society organizations, demonstrators, and movement supporters changed the focus of attention towards the need for efficient measures to control the contagion. By the second Friday of March, protestors understood the seriousness of the health situation and refrained from protesting. A banner on Dignity Square exemplified this position: “Total quarantine now! Do you think that a government that ordered repression, mutilations, and murders would like the best for the people? Wake up and stay at home.”

A few days later, the demands for strong political action to regulate and prevent a health system crisis were heard. The president declared a 90-day state of catastrophe that imposed several restrictions on movement, amplified government power, and enforced quarantine and isolation measures. That night, the president also announced a nightly curfew, and one week later, a mandatory quarantine for several districts around the country. These measures worked also as an official order to suspend the mobilizations, affecting the movement’s spatial dimension in at least two ways: restricting its freedom of movement and attempting to clean up its traces, through “rules of exclusion and rules of purification” (Armstrong, 1993, p. 394).

First, the state of catastrophe, the curfew and the mandatory quarantine imposed strong control over the freedom to traverse cities or, in Armstrong’s words, “rules of exclusion.” On the one hand, the streets became a policed space where everyone could be a subject of detention and control. On the other, transportation between different areas of the city became a challenge as using buses and subways meant the possibility of being infected. Consequently, the movement had to restrict its public repertoires and had started to plan and imagine different formulas to remain alive until the end of confinement.

Offline mobilizations quickly turned into forms of online demonstrations using several platforms and apps to arrange virtual meetings, organize solidarity campaigns for health care workers and victims of repression, denounce government misinformation, recommend how to avoid the virus and take care of each other, and demand more and better measures to protect people from contagion equally, among others. The movement also strengthened some local and offline repertoires, such as singing and banging pots and pans from balconies and windows, and coordinating neighbor solidarity networks to help and protect the elderly.

The spatial dimension of the movement was also disturbed as a part of the emergency measures through a governmentally imposed discourse of public hygiene that concretely translated to the order for social distancing and disinfection of communal areas. The decontamination narrative was assumed literally by some authorities who, for example, on the first night of the curfew, ordered clean up of the city, especially its walls. Many facades, walls, and monuments woke with a layer of grey or beige paint as an attempt to cover thousands of graphic protests, including those inscribed on the monument to General Manuel Baquedano located in the heart of Dignity Square, evidencing “rules of purification” (Armstrong, 1993).

The attempt to erase the graphic vestiges of the movement has been condemned online by showing images and videos of the covered walls and by denouncing authorities’ actions that deviate from the ethical attention to the global health crisis. In some cases, as with the monument in Dignity Square, anonymous protestors have been in charge of re-covering the walls with graffiti, posters, and art installations. The connection between space, memory, and social movements has shown to be strong, and it remains to be one of the public repertoires that continues to keep the mobilizations alive.

The Chilean Anti-Neoliberal Movement and Its Multiple Urban Memories

The relationship between memory, space, and mobilization has been studied in political and cultural sociology and more recently in the field of memory studies. Authors in this field have emphasized that collective action requires not only concrete spaces that can be transformed in the course of protests (Daphi, 2017a; Tilly, 1994) but that the space itself is produced and imagined through these interactions also (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1996). When these interactions are significant, or imply a disruption in everyday life, they become memorable actions—interactions that will leave concrete and symbolic traces that can transform the present and future of social movements (Jelin, 2002; Jelin & Langland, 2003).

In this line of argumentation, some authors have underlined the role of urban memory, built into social interactions through space for the strength, legitimacy, and collective identity of social movements (Daphi, 2017b; Daphi & Zamponi, 2019). This urban memory contributes to the recuperation and recreation of past practices, symbols, and discourses by supporting the goals of collective action (Daphi, 2017b; Spencer, 2016), as well as the strengthening of the movement, its identity, and its demands in the present (Badilla Rajevic, 2019; Daphi & Zamponi, 2019). In this sense, urban memory can update and revive the imaginary and projects of a social movement, as well as its impact on the city (Spencer, 2016). Those memories recorded in the urban patchwork (Caldeira, 2009; Jelin & Langland, 2003) such as, graffiti, modified statues, damaged or burned buildings, and new memorials will contribute to the continuity and future imagination of the movement (Jelin, 2002; Rigney, 2018).

The process of social mobilization started in Chile on October 18, 2019, and has marked the city, filling it with multiple memories that have been activated, transmitted, and materialized during the months of mobilizations. On the one hand, the movement built its own memory that considers not only a narrative but also a series of icons and places. Thus, the mobilization’s narrative is the moment when “Chile woke up”, a moment that will continue “until dignity becomes a habit” and the “Pinochet constitution” ends—slogans that adorned the walls of multiple cities. On the other hand, various symbols have been engraved in this urban memory, including local heroes, like the Matapacos Dog (Figure 2), a black stray dog with a red scarf on its neck famous for barking at police, whose image had previously accompanied the 2011 student movement. Finally, Chilean urban squares, and their monuments, were marked daily with protests and interventions, including renaming, as in the aforementioned Plaza Italia being renamed Plaza Dignidad—a name that was even added, at least for a few days, to Google Maps.

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Figure 2.

Matapacos Dog’s statue in one of the movement’s demonstrations in Providencia Avenue. Photo by Rubén Santander

In addition, the movement activated and used the memory of other historical periods in Chile (Harris, 2006), especially the memory of the repression perpetrated by the military dictatorship (Aguilera, 2020; Ljubetic & Millaleo, 2019), and the memory of the economic and structural violence sustained by the transition to democracy. One of the movement’s first slogans represented this last way of remembering, pointing out that the movement had nothing to do with the 30 pesos increase in the subway ticket that triggered the mobilizations (0.035 USD) but with the 30 years since the end of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime: “It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years.” This phrase, along with others such as “1973/2019”, “the dictatorship continues” or “[Piñera] murderer just like Pinochet” covered walls and monuments as well as banners during mobilizations.

The interaction between the memories of Chile’s recent past and the social movement increased when cases of police abuse and repression were made public. These abuses were registered and denounced by civil society, the National Institute of Human Rights, and at least four international organizations. ³ However, they were systematically dismissed by the government. The violence and abuses perpetrated by the security forces especially awakened the memory of the struggle for the defense of human rights sustained for more than 45 years by various groups of relatives of Pinochet’s victims. This memory was recovered and recreated providing access to a number of practices of struggle and denunciation that the protesters deployed throughout the city. Many improvised memorials covered corners and squares with photographs and candles to remember the fatal victims of the movement, along with victims of the dictatorship and of the Mapuche people murdered under democracy (Figure 3). Likewise, graffiti that connected the struggle for human rights during the military dictatorship with the violent police practices aimed at controlling the mobilizations appeared in numerous places in the city.

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Figure 3.

Memorial to the victims of the state and to Mapuche activist Camilo Catrillanca. Photo by the author.

Urban Memories and the Continuity of the Movement’s Imaginaries

I suggest that the effects of these urban memories, memory of the movement, and memories of Chile’s recent pasts that re-emerged and were mobilized during the protests, would be essential to the continuity and to future imagination of the quarantined Chilean anti-neoliberal movement as the graffiti inscribed on the monument located in the now-empty square where President Piñera posed for a picture illustrated: “Piñera go away”.

The plurality of urban memories used and transmitted during the Chilean anti-neoliberal movement have left their vestiges all around the country, demonstrating their capacity to defy quarantine boundaries as well as to last in the social imaginary of the protests that have changed Chile’s political landscape. The emergence of new and past memories has shaped and fueled the anti-neoliberal movement with images, discourses, and actions, strengthening its present and somehow ensuring its continuity.