Diasporic constellations: The Chilean exile diaspora space as a multidirectional landscape of memory

Introduction

This essay explores how the presence in the diaspora space of Chilean exiles in the United Kingdom (UK) has triggered a new ‘memory constellation’ ¹ to appear, exposing alternative linkages to the field of the ‘politics of memory’ ² in the Southern Cone that do not adhere to traditional memory sites, but rather create embodied and mobile commemorative practices and new landscapes of memory involving different ‘multidirectional’ ³ audiences. In doing so, itaims to address ongoing concerns and debates as to the future of the discipline of memory studies, ⁴ answering thecall of various scholars in a roundtable discussion such as Andreas Huyssen (2012) to pay closer attention to the ‘transnational effects of discourses’. Furthermore, it follows Vivian Liska’s (2012) comments in response to Huyssenand inspired by Walter Benjamin, to not lose sight of the ‘fleetingness’ of fragile and ‘unusable’ traumatic memories that defy representation and that in turn keep the past open for the future. Alongside Pieter Vermeulen’s (2012) argumentof how different ‘affective ecologies’ are formed from individual and collective experiences of trauma, mourning and loss which (following Roger Luckhurst and Carrie Hamilton) can produce transformative moments of ‘resilience’ and ‘pleasure’ in our engagement with memorial practices and their non-memorial counterparts. Finally, following on from Richard Crownshaw’s (2012) assessment of Vermeulen’s argument as tothe future of memory studies, this essay considers ‘how responses to the past might be transformed into future political action’ and to the certain ‘local inflections of affective disposition and how they might be activated’ (Crownshaw, 2012: 235).

The various oral narratives presented here belong to second-generation ⁵ Chileans living in the UK whose relatives arrived thereas political exiles and refugees in the 1970s. I discuss how these narratives demonstrate the formation of a wider, mobile diasporic landscape of memory forremembering and mourning the afterlife of the dictatorship where, as Avtar Brah (1996) has argued, the ‘diaspora space’ represents the intersectionality of different ‘historically contingent’ genealogies of dispersal and ‘staying put’. Following Brah, I will argue that these shifting commemorative practices are constructed from ‘within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life’ (Brah, 1996: 183) where the ‘we’ is constituted in the diaspora space by the simultaneous effects of the ‘mythic place of desire’ and the ‘lived experience of locality’ (Brah, 1996: 192). Not only, then, are diaspora spaces in this case viewed as ‘potentially the sites of hopes and new beginnings. They are contested cultural and political terrains where individual and collective memories collide, reassemble and reconfigure’ (Brah, 1996: 193), but also functioning according to Brah, as multilocational points of ‘theoretical creolisation’, where ‘travelling’ theories of memory come to be inscribed and where ‘“travel” is therefore an expression of the principal logic of memory: its genesis and existence through movement’ (Erll, 2011: 12).

In presenting these narratives, this essay finally proposes that a mediation of the mobility of the Chilean exile diaspora space in the UK as a commemorative space of mourning offers future opportunities for assessing how certain ‘travelling’ memory studies discourses that have made an impact on the study of cultural memory of the Southern Cone military regimes come to meet at certain multidirectional crossroads. Notably,on the ways in which the diaspora space of the Chilean exile diaspora in the UK forms a fleeting and multisited constellation of memory away from the dominant field of the politics of memory in Chile.

Diasporic constellations

Studies of the Chilean exile diaspora that arrived in the UKfrom the 1970s onwards have tended to focus on the historical trajectory of highly politicised individuals generally contained within a timeline of arrival and return. In fact, from the very moment of arrival, a key feature of this diaspora as evidenced in the literature, has been the link between early reconstructions in exile of old political alliances destroyed by the military coup that went on to defythe regime from abroad, alongside for many, the hope of return home in the process of restoration to democracy during the 1980s–1990s (Hirsch, 2012). This essay relates to a more current but nevertheless neglected aspect of this diaspora, namely, the growing involvement in more recent commemorative practices by the second and even third generation that was born and came of age in the UK, who in their own right have come to re-define the political struggles initiated by the previous generation to remember and to mourn the afterlife of the Chilean coup (Serpente, 2011, 2014). This is especially the case since the end of military rule in Chile by 1990 did not signal a complete restoration of democratic rule, but rather a long protracted period where General Pinochet continued to exert his influence on the Chilean political sphere as he served as the head of the armed forces well into the late 1990s. This means that the more recent presence of the second and third generation (from childhood into adulthood) in diasporic commemorations has not just concerned the remembrance of the coup and the detained-disappeared, but marking the historic presence of the first generation of political exiles since the 1970s in the UK, and now including the concerns of newer generations of political activists who grew up in the diaspora space. As such, the narratives here help us to assess how diasporic commemorative processes and spaces mark a confluence between ongoing cultural memory debates in Chile and in the diaspora that produce different diasporic positionalities. Let us consider, for example, Luis’ response when I asked him whether he remembered any stories told to him by his father, who according to him had managed to escape Chile in 1976 with the help of a grant from the World University Service. He stated that:

From what I can remember there were never any specific stories, like his personal stories but, and I can’t remember at what age I knew or realised this. But I always knew that he had come to England because of the coup, and you know, he would always take me to his friend’s house and they were all Chilean so, yeah basically I don’t know from what age but I grew up knowing that I was with a group of people who had been forced to leave their country and many of whom had been tortured, and yeah so I kinda just knew why they were there. And I think also caus he took me to the protests and stuff as well, and you’d see the anger and the passion in other people, like I said I don’t know what age it was but I just grew up knowing that. ⁶

There are two significant and interrelated components in Luis’ narrative. The first includes an awareness of the affective components of those fleeting emotional moments of past political protests belonging to the first generation, which in turn, he uses to evoke the creation of a shared space of remembrance where the radical potential of the past can only be realised within the present moment of recognition. Thus, a new diasporic constellation appears as a landscape of mourning where Luis can come to create a living connection with the past militancy of his father’s generation. It is precisely through this unexpected encounter with a collective body of exiles that Luis can multidirectionally link past militancies with the emergence of his own, and positively claim that he ‘always knew’ this.

Pinochet 1998

There is no doubt that the arrest of General Pinochet in London in 1998 marked a turning point for the activation of new mobile commemorative spaces of remembering the afterlife of the Chilean dictatorship from the point-of-view of the diaspora space.

By March of that year, Pinochet had stepped down as head of the armed forces and was sworn by congress as a ‘Senator for Life’. On 16 October while on a visit to London for back treatment and to visit his old ally Margaret Thatcher, he was arrested by Scotland Yard acting on a request from Judge Baltasar Garzón from the Spanish National High Court. Judge Garzón was himself acting under petition by lawyer Joan Garcés attempting to have the ex-dictator extradited to face charges for crimes against humanity, including terrorism, torture and genocide. Charges that had been able to be brought forward through the work of transnational networks of Chileans and other Latin American exiles across various continents (Huneeus, 2003; Roht-Arriaza, 2005). Pinochet’s detention lasted a total of 503 days where the decision whether to extradite or to allow him to return home rested in the hands of theLabour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Law Lords in the House of Lords based on the decision of whether Pinochet should be granted immunity under British law protecting heads of state accused of human rights abuses (Davis, 2003; Wright and Oñate, 2007).

Immediately, the Chilean diaspora in the UK responded to Pinochet’s arrest and for the whole of the 503 days that he remained on British soil, enacted alongside the wider British public and other supporters, a daily picket outside the London Clinic and the house in Virginia Water where he was held under house arrest, that became known as ‘El Piquete de Londres’. Subsequently, the picket represented a turning point between the past and the present for the generation of political exiles and their kin, in the sense that for many second-generation subjects that I interviewed, it represented their first taste of political action, bringing back under the spotlight the political struggles of the 1970s initiated between Chilean exiles, the British public,and various institutions and organisations that had assisted their campaign against the regime. ⁷ Therefore, the re-appearance of a Chilean mobile landscape of memory also depended on the growing interest from the next generation in uncovering and sharing previously unknown private traumatic familial narratives within the public sphere of the diaspora space.

While similarly to Luis, Emilio also claimed that while growing up, he did not remember specific stories transmitted to him by his family members since ‘it wasn’t really something that we kind of talked about in detail’: the arrest of Pinochet in 1998 would unveil for him a new affiliative connection with the history of the dictatorship in Chile, where ‘I suppose when Pinochet got arrested here was when lots of other things came, my parents were both interviewed in the media quite a lot, you know, it came out, stuff came out’. This ‘coming out’ of first-generation testimonial accounts containing experiences of kidnap, torture, disappearance and exile during the regime transformed the next generation into secondary witnesses to this process, not only by testifying to their parents’ and other relatives’ previous political militancy during the time ofPresident Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970-1973), but by uncovering the political activism of the 1970s from the diaspora space.

Another second-generation individual, Alicia, also shared a similar experience when she claimed not to know much about her parents’ past previous to 1998, stating that ‘actually I think I was quite unaware until Pinochet arrived to this country’. At the time the picket for Alicia did not just represent the hopes of many to finally bring the dictator to justice, but an awareness of her positionality as a second-generation subject beginning to identify with Chile and what had taken place in the past:

I personally think, not that they’re ignorant, but everyone lives in their own little world in this country, and I think some people are not even aware of what’s happening on the international community. So until you are personally affected or it’s in the news regarding your country, until Pinochet arrived in Britain, the British people started to know what was occurring, or occurred in Chile. And then of course, I felt that that identity and I considered myself Chilean. And of course even though I didn’t live it, I felt that I had to be there in representation of my family. ⁸

Not only does Alicia consider herself as ‘Chilean’ for the first time, her narrative reawakens the wider collective body of the Chilean diaspora present at the picket, where despite her not having ‘lived’ the dictatorship or exile, she manages to place her own body forward to work in representation of her family. By positioning herself in this way shea embodies a new mobile space of mourning the dictatorial past, where she can marvel at how such as ‘small community can make such a big statement regarding politics and how it can make everyone’s eyes looking one way and that’s what I felt happened’. It is not the case then that this mobile affective community ⁹ has had an uninterrupted history, but rather that certain moments have permeated its fleeting presencewith invigorating and rejuvenating effects, where the appearance of second-generation political subjects imbued the picket with their own political reflexivities, and thus creating new shared spaces for commemorating how present political actions can in turn inform new critical inquiries towards the past.

For Luis, despite the eventual negative outcome of the case after Pinochet, on the grounds of ill healthwas eventually allowed to return to Chile in 2000, ¹⁰ the picket symbolised a time for the Chilean exile diaspora to come together and reassert their presence in the diaspora space:

It was amazing that he was even considered to be put on trial, that in a way was an achievement and that fact that he was denounced worldwide for ages as you know. ‘What’s he on trial for?’ ‘Human rights abuses’, therefore they’re human rights abuses in Chile. I mean that got everywhere basically which is an achievement as well. And the fact that from there he went back to Chile and his influence and power went down completely which was really important because he was still really influential, and it brought the whole debate into Chile of what actually happened. So there were lots of benefits in a sense which may it’s easier to see from England rather than being in Chile, to see those benefits. But yeah it was just like I say a really unique time, it kinda felt touching like being in touching distance of something that could actually happened, the he could actually be tried. Well, ‘cause we went on the protests and got together a lot more with the whole Chilean community, yeah you were just seeing people all the time. So yeah, it was a big moment, kinda mixed emotions you know, really happy that he was arrested … and then he got away with it.

In Luis’ narrative, we can see the colliding of different generational memories and expectations forging an affective community founded beyond the direct victims of the Chilean dictatorship. Luis demonstrates that what was at stake at that time was not only the reception of the case and its impact on Chilean politics but a growing awareness on the part of the diasporic second-generation of the multidirectional and multisited facets of such an event that interconnected the field of the politics of memory in Chile, with the diaspora space. In this case, where experiencing being in ‘touching distance’ of justiceoutweighed Pinochet’s eventual release, and ‘easier to see from England, rather than being in Chile’. ¹¹

Brotherly affects

The Pinochet case ignited in the siblings Alberto and José a desire and commitment to find out more about the past, and their father’s story in how he came to the UK as a teenager. Back then their father hadescaped the military regime alongside other siblings soon followed in exile by theirparents, as José and Alberto’s grandfather, a city politician and a mayor at the time of the coup had been jailed and tortured for supporting Allende’s Popular Unity government. As young children, Alberto and José were taken frequently to the picket, with their father being one of the more prominent figures among the Chilean exiles who coordinated the daily protests and vigils. Being so young at the time, Alberto and José claimed that they were incapable of really understanding the magnitude of what was going on:

In contrast, what they did remember about that time was feeling excited at the prospect of ‘going out’ and taking time off school. According to them:

Alongside the strenuous and emotional work carried out by the adults in staging the picket stood side-by-side the perception of the second-generation that viewed this highly momentous occasion as children and young adults, conveying altogether different attributes to the act of political protest: the possibility for expressing joy and pleasure in sharing something together. For Alberto and José, the picket was not just about whether Pinochet would be extradited, it was also about a release of tension through people coming together to shout, eat and dance. Once again, for those in the second-generation who had been too young to participate or not yet born during the early years of the Chile Solidarity Campaign in the UK, this was the first time they were experiencing occasions similar to those events that had brought different groups of Chilean exiles and their supporters together in the 1970s. The diaspora space in this case then creates ‘the probability of certain forms of consciousness emerging [that] are subject to the play of political power and psychic investments in the maintenance or erosion of the status quo’ (Brah, 1996: 208), where:

Through their resistance, solidarity strategies, and commemorative practices, Chileans created and inhabited a newly devised distinct space. From this vantage point, they filtered information coming from ‘inside’ and amplified and disseminated vestiges of the past. With their emphasis on solidarity practices, they were able to create an expanse both to contain memory and to produce opposition to the military dictatorship. It was into this constructed site of struggle that General Pinochet inadvertently fell when he was arrested in London in October 1998. (Simalchik, 2006: 102)

The mobile constructed site of struggle of the Chilean diaspora in the UK then was no longer exclusive to the families of exiles and their kin, but exposed and celebrated among an extensive affective community of activists, where adults shared their experiences with their children, children among children, and with the wider British public. This sense of togetherness is conveyed by Alberto in terms of the good humour and camaraderie that grew among the picketers:

That was one of the things that made it so great as well ‘cause like, we became really close-knit by the end, ‘cause people would sleep there and be there non-stop for twenty four hours. And then you’d end up seeing the same faces, and everyone was joking around.

The closeness of the picket was extended on further occasions, when, for example, the brothers describe how they and others huddled together around a radio to hear the verdict of the Lords decisions:

At the beginning it was two votes against arresting him, and we’re huddled around the radio and we’re all gutted, and then it was like 2-1, and then it was 2-2. […] And then the last guy said ‘we’re going to arrest him’, you know, it was like 3-2, you know, that’s the vote. We all celebrated, we turned on the music, we all danced, you know, we shouted, we had food. That was definitely the strongest memory of the picket, when they voted ‘for’. But it never came to fruition, because then he just said ‘oh, I’m too ill’, and then he got sent back to Chile.

A mixture of elation and sadness is expressed here, with echoes of the same habitual rituals that a passionate football fan would feel while listening to his team lose on the radio.

New affective ecologies of memory

Since their participation in the picket, the brothers have also been more recently involved with the work of a human rights group named Ecomemoria, based in the UK and founded, among others, by their father and aunt during the detention of Pinochet in 1998. Ecomemoria is a group that invites people to commemorate the lives of the Chilean detained-disappeared, by planting trees in different shifting sites that so far have tended to be associated with places where the Chilean exile diaspora resides. Alberto and José explained that the ceremony involves certain commemorative components that would be adapted according to the person being commemorated, and the site of commemoration, with the choice of readings, songs and other rituals performed if possible in conjunction with the relatives or friends of the detained-disappeared, to be able to provide personal information about that person’s life. One key aspect of the ceremony that evokes the past militancy of the detained-disappeared are the traditional salutes and calls common in naming ceremonies in Latin America and used by exiles in the diaspora, where the names of the detained-disappeared are read out loud and those in attendance respond by shouting out ¡presente! (present!): symbolising the haunting presence of those individuals among the participants (Ramírez and Serpente, 2012). Consequently, while each ceremony contains such similar components (a gathering, a procession, readings, music, the planting, dancing, and so on), the specificity of each site and the make-up of the participants who are not just Ecomemoria members but also members of the wider British public imbue each ceremony with its own configuration dependent on the collective ‘affective labour’ of the participants (Ramírez and Serpente, 2012), including the possibility for other multidirectional memories to emerge. Overall then, the very act of planting a tree in a different physical landscape in this case recognises the multi-locationality of the Chilean diaspora space, by confronting the notion of fixed origins as well as of fixed memory discourses in the UK and beyond.

If there is one constant in relation to the political militancy of exiles on arrival in the 1970s, through to the picket against Pinochet, and now in the Ecomemoria ceremonies, it is how the first generation of political exiles has always involved their children in their mobile commemorative practices. This was extremely visible in the case of Alberto and José in the most recent Ecomemoria tree-planting event in Wales in August 2011, where they actively participated (among other second-generation individuals) in all of the preparations as well as the actual ceremony. ¹³ Alberto and José detailed how they had been asked by their father to help him write a speech that they all read out together concerning one of the detained-disappeared persons who had been a young soldier murdered by the regime after refusing to take part in repression. They both identified a feeling of pride at being asked to do this and an awareness of where their involvement fitted in with past commemorations and events. They stated that:

Pursuing justice would later involve new ways of keeping active, by seeking new forms and spaces of remembrance, which in the case of the Welsh ceremony included the participation of the local Welsh people and those attending the yearly festival in Machynlleth honouring the life of the celebrated Chilean poet and musician Víctor Jara also murdered by the Chilean regime. The locationality of this site expressed through the singing of a Welsh song for example,also drew attention to the positionality of the trees on the border of Machynlleth with the hills in the background and on the border between a community sensory garden and a playing field.This delineation on the very edge of memory itself exposed the multidirectional potential of the ceremony to align the participants with the lives of the detained-disappeared, the exiles, the objectives of the festival and even the local histories of Welsh nationalism.

Therefore, as I have argued elsewhere, the multidirectional aspects of this ceremony not only conjured the ghosts of the detained-disappeared now haunting new diasporic spaces of belonging, butsimilarly evokingthemobile nature of the diaspora space for a new audience of participants not just attending as mere witnesses, but put to work throughout: to carry, to dig, to plant, to sing, to dance, to shout, and so on (Ramírez and Serpente, 2012). This affective community of which Alberto and José formed a part galvanised the potential for unexpected encounters to occur between participants and between other traumatic events not tied to the Southern Cone military dictatorships, such as other histories of leftist political participation in other Latin American and European contexts, and so on. Here, individuals came into being through the momentary materialisation of a collective body of memory, connecting the displacement of the Chilean diaspora with the locality of the UK diaspora space and of the ceremony, allowing subsequent generations and others to affirm their own links to plethora of traumatic pasts. Thisis an example of a radical resignification of traumatic memory in the diaspora space, creating opportunities for new bonds to be articulated among a wider audience beyond the traumas of the dictatorship, as a multidirectional coming together celebrating the potential and fleeting formation of new kinds of political subjectivities.

Multidirectional connections

While the creation of mobile commemorative spaces and landscapes of memory has been crucial for the Chilean diaspora in the UK, being able to make connections between distant commemorative sites has also been important. Luis is such a case in point in the sense that his past attendance at funas ¹⁴ held in Chile generally around the anniversary of the coup on 11 September has led to the formation of a political will to not only care about the dictatorial past related to his own familial story, but also:

I think like I say, you either want to engage with what happened or you don’t. And I have and yeah it’s defined everything I want to do and my motivation now. I work for a development agency and I want to promote social change and it’s definitely all from that. I mean I might wanted to do that anyway, but there’s definitely like a real core there. It’s kind of, I don’t know it sounds all romantic and stuff but you kind of want to carry on, you don’t just want to kind of leave it, you kind of know what happened and you don’t want it to happen again and work for any opportunity for positive social change and those kinds of things.

This new-found ‘real core’ political engagement for Luis propels him beyond his roots of the Chilean exile diaspora space towards a more multidirectional outlook striving towards ‘positive social change’. When I asked him about the impact of his father’s political exile, the importance of his positionality within a mobile diaspora space becomes clear:

Well, it’s been massive, there’s no doubt about that. I haven’t grown up in Chile, I’ve grown up here so people always ask you, ‘where’s your name from?’ ‘Where are you from and your parents?’ So I would say, ‘my dad’s from Chile’. And it’s not like I think about it every single time but you know, there’s a reason that he’s from Chile, there’s a reason that I’m here, and that reason is the coup. He wouldn’t have come to England, it’s as simple as that, so in that sense I’ve talked to my friends about this as well. We exist because of the coup.

Together with his friends who are also second-generation sons and daughters of Chilean political exiles, Luis articulates a powerful multidirectional recognition of the multiple connections that he is actively recreating between the past and the present, between generations, and between different memory discourses that exposes the collective and affective dimensions of the diaspora space not just as a commemorative space, but constitutive of their own existence. This has allowed the second- generation featured here to be able to reflect upon their own identities, and political projects and interests, ‘where what is at stake is the infinite experentiality, the myriad processes of cultural fissure and fusion that underwrite contemporary forms of transcultural identities’ (Brah, 1996: 208). Equally, being ‘Chilean’ for Alberto and José is structured around a constantly changing relationship with ‘British culture’ and how it relates to their positionalities compared to a wider mobile landscape of memory of the Chilean diaspora space that has affected not only their own family, but also others:

They also spoke about the student protests of 2010–2011 in London, where José mentioned that despite him being part of the last wave of students lucky enough to pay the £3000 tuition fees a year which was about to rise to £9000, he still felt committed to attend the protests in London. He explained that:

In solidarity with fellow students, Alberto and José’s experience of the student riots articulates in their joint multidirectional narrative an empathetic script galvanised through their past participations in the picket against Pinochet in 1998 and their more recent work with Ecomemoria. As ethical ‘Chilean’ memory subjects then, their reflexive positionings reflect the multifaceted connections that multidirectional commemorative practices and new spaces and landscapes of memory belonging to the Chilean exile diaspora in the UK inspire outwards towards other memory landscapes and other histories of defiance and struggle.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that the diaspora space of the Chilean exiles in the UK and, in particular, the participation of the second-generation in mobile commemorative practices create new spaces and landscapes of memory, as multidirectional constellations that signal new ways of relating with the dictatorial past and other traumatic legacies from the point-of-view of the diasporic present. In this sense, looking at the emergence of new multidirectional spaces of memory in the diaspora space reinvigorates the call from memory studies scholars to look at the ways in which memory discourses travel beyond transnational boundaries, creating, as Vermeulen has argued, new ecologies of affect that contain the potential to transform the poetics of memory into a politics of memory.

For those second-generation Chilean individuals featured, the potentiality of the diaspora space lies in their own reflexive positionality to make those multiple fleeting connections between different historical traumas happen, in turn, allowing those of us who study the afterlife of the Southern Cone military dictatorships to begin to acknowledge how the field of the politics of memory is itself a travelling entity. The challenge for the future then continues to be for us to recognise where and how this field meets the boundaries of the diaspora space (Serpente, 2014), constituting different mobile and multidirectional relations between different memorial landscapes. It is these very multidirectional connections that we have seen emerge from different historical moments: from the political militancy of the first-generation of political exiles who arrived in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, the arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998, to the participation of the second-generation in more recent commemorative events. Therefore, the second-generation narratives presented here open up new debates on the collective pleasures of protest, mobile commemoration and mourning the Chilean dictatorial past, where the refusal of certain exile memories to be contained continues to produce unpredictable and fleeting encounters that travel across borders.