Abstract
Siri Schwabe’s recent book, Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile, opens with a powerful scene of protesters moving through the heart of Santiago, Chile, marching against the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza. Schwabe paints a vivid picture of the vast presence of Palestinian symbols, identity, and support in Chile as she follows protestors through the march as they wave Palestinian flags, wear keffiyeh scarves, and chant, “¡Gaza resiste! ¡Palestina existe!” (p. 1). As I write this review in November 2023, nearly 10 years after the 2014 war on Gaza, Schwabe’s account carries an unfortunately clear echo. Following attacks by Hamas on southern Israel on 7th October 2023, Israel responded with an air and land invasion of Gaza, which, to date, has resulted in over 11,000 Palestinian deaths (Mellen et al., 2023). As I follow the news from my apartment in Chicago, I watch online as protests calling for a ceasefire and Palestinian liberation erupt around the globe, especially in Chile. My friends and contacts in Santiago and throughout the region forward me videos of Santiago’s downtown square flooded with protestors again donning keffiyehs and chanting support for Gaza.
Schwabe’s descriptions, analyses and arguments in Moving Memory not only resonate with the current Chilean reactions to the tragically cyclical nature of Israeli violence in Palestine but also provide readers and scholars with a structure to understand both the grand and quotidian ways that Palestinians in the diaspora relate to and remember their homeland. The book grapples with how Palestinian Chileans’ transnational memories of a distant and largely inaccessible Palestinian homeland interact with local memories of significant transformations in Chile around the dictatorship era of the 1970s and the subsequent post-dictatorship neoliberal realities. To understand these complex spatial and temporal dimensions of diasporic belonging, Schwabe develops the concept of moving memory, or, as she defines, “memory in movement within and between people and spaces. I use the term moving as both a verb and an adjective to denote both the mobile and affective aspects of remembrance and the interconnections between these” (p. 4, original emphasis). In centering movement, Schwabe examines the complex pathways and exchanges of memories and the boundaries, frictions, and flows of remembrances characteristic of, but not unique to, the Palestinian Chilean diaspora.
Moving Memory draws on a year of ethnographic participation within several places culturally and spatially central to the Palestinian diaspora in Santiago (the neighborhoods of Patronato and Las Condes, the Club Palestino Social Club, and the Club Deportivo Palestino soccer stadium) and in connection with several individuals and social groups, including members of Unión General de Estudiantes Palestinos (General Union of Palestinian Students). The book builds on detailed histories of Palestinian migration to the Americas and the formation of diasporic identities. Drawing on these rich information sources, Schwabe triangulates accounts to engage with canonical and contemporary theoretical discussions of collective memory, migrant belonging, and the politics of remembering.
Schwabe’s contribution to memory studies is clear and compelling. Moving memory, defined above, offers a new take on collective memory that builds on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory”—the quality of powerful memories to be transferred between generations—and Astrid Erll’s notion of “travelling memory”—the quality of memories to travel and evolve through transfer. The Palestinian Chilean case exemplifies how remembering is an iterative process that involves movement through time and across space, or what is described in the book as “mnemonic landscapes.” As Schwabe notes,
What characterizes these landscapes are years of unrest and violence, Palestine being at the center of an extensive settler colonial project, and Santiago having developed and changed immensely during the era of Chilean military rule and in the afterlife of dictatorship since the 1990s. (p. 17)
These overlapping mnemonic landscapes create a complex history and relation between the diaspora and national identities.
With lucid ethnographic details and lively writing, Schwabe describes the contexts under which the Palestinian diaspora emerged and solidified in Chile. Through a tour of Patronato, a symbolically and spatially central Santiago neighborhood, for instance, Schwabe contextualizes the early migratory histories of Arab migration to Latin America, the initial entrepreneurial spirit of Palestinian migrants, and subsequent tensions in relations between the diaspora and its host. Grounded in the stories of Schwabe’s Palestinian Chilean contacts, the reader learns of the importance of family connections and social spaces to the formation of a “shared Palestinianness” in Chile and the diaspora’s political shift to the right stemming from the support of Augusto Pinochet’s neoliberal dictatorship of the 1970s (p. 30).
These general themes are then explored through careful analysis. In chapter 2, for example, Schwabe highlights the parallel political histories of Chile and Palestine and discusses the nuances of the present-day commemoration of critical events. In a section titled “Watershed moments: 1948 and 1973,” Schwabe highlights the importance of both the Nakba—when Israel expelled Palestinians from their land in 1948—and the Chilean coup—when the government of Salvador Allende was toppled and replaced with the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The chapter traces a 2014 Nakba commemoration event in Santiago while cleverly elucidating the complex ways that Palestinian Chileans and Chileans relate to such events. For some, Palestinian liberation and indigenous rights in Chile are twin causes with similar settler-colonial roots. For the conservative majority, separating advocacy for the Palestinian cause from local political affiliations in Chile is a natural division. Schwabe uses the commemoration event
to explore the dynamics of moving memory—a phenomenon that refers to overlapping pasts, presents, and futures all at once—as it is confronted with local political circumstances that render it impossible to confine and difficult to steer in any singular direction. (p. 38)
Powerful remembrances move people to action, but which actions are appropriate is often contested.
The politics of remembering are deeply entangled with the politics of forgetting. In chapter 3, Schwabe shows how Palestinian Chileans draw mnemonic boundaries around collective memories that foreground Palestinian histories and avoid Chilean ones. Through this intentional forgetting, some memories are ignored, and others become stagnant. As Schwabe notes,
while the subject of Pinochet and fraught memories of military rule cannot easily be dealt with within the domain of the Palestinian establishment—and in some cases, within Palestinian Chilean families—memories pertaining to the ongoing Palestinian struggle, and in particular the Nakba, are regularly brought forth without conflict. (p. 69)
Contending with “uneasy” individual and collective relationships to the dictatorship often results in absences where particular pasts are intentionally forgotten.
Another significant contribution of Moving Memory is Schwabe’s analysis of the overlapping spatial and temporal dimensions of memory. Chapter 4, for instance, centers on Club Palestino, a social club dedicated to Palestinian advocacy, cultural celebration, and community building in Chile. By tracing the relationships of her participants to the club, Schwabe demonstrates how the institution serves multiple purposes but fundamentally grounds a sense of belonging for its Palestinian Chilean members. The club, as a physical and symbolic place, takes on significance in part due to its role in connecting the diaspora and in part because the club serves as a firmly Palestinian space amid ongoing Palestinian struggles around land and territoriality with Israel. In Schwabe’s words,
Club Palestino embodies a Chilean Palestinianness and a commitment to Palestine that seem embedded within its very walls. The location of the club, its vastness, its layout, the architecture of its buildings and the design of its facilities, the pictures on the walls, the menu at the restaurant, even the marks left by shoes on its wooden floors and the stains that have merged into the fabric of chairs and rugs over the years—all these physical features seem more than just that. Rather than simply signs pointing to human practices, these features seem in and of themselves inseparable from the Palestinianness to which the place belongs, materializations of the connection to Palestine. (p. 76)
While embedded in Chile and the Chilean political context, Club Palestino members use the club as a space to identify with Palestine. Schwabe points to other central Palestinian Chilean spaces in the area, such as the neighborhood of Patronato, and also references how some interlocutors have been able to return to Palestine and relive the memories of their parents and grandparents while experiencing their own new encounters with Palestine.
Finally, chapter 5 brings the reader along as Schwabe details the experience of protesters who marched against the 2014 war on Gaza. Through visceral accounts of the sights and sounds of the marches, Schwabe demonstrates how Chilean Palestinians advocated for Palestinian presence in Chile and encountered the tragic accounts coming from Gaza. Schwabe shows how bodies, images, and memories are constantly on the move in tangled ways—through social media, migration, and protest, for example. She writes,
The protests and demonstrations that took place in Santiago during the Chilean winter of 2014 did just that: they looked back and looked ahead at the same time, tying in not only with a history of popular dissent in the Chilean capital but also with the Palestinian struggle itself. (p. 97)
Schwabe concisely packs a lot of detail and theory building into a few pages. Still, I believe a few avenues could be further explored. At several points throughout the text, Schwabe references the tensions between Chileans and Palestinian Chileans, given the migratory history, unique relations to the dictatorship, and attachments to Palestinianness and the Palestinian cause. I would like to know more about how early Chilean orientalism and racial stigmatization around turcophobia are remembered and relived in the present, particularly in relation to the emergent anti-immigrant sentiments surrounding new waves of Central and South American migration arriving to Chile over the last decade. Second, Schwabe notes the importance of families in determining which memories are passed on and how they are remembered. I remain curious about how other actors and institutions shape these memories and where power is located in said determinations. How do recent Palestinian and other Arab migrants to Chile relate to the memories and identities of third- and fourth-generation Palestinian Chileans, for instance?
I highly recommend Moving Memory to scholars of memory, diaspora, and social movements and the general curious reader interested in learning about the nuances of global connections between the Middle East and Latin America. Through accessible and exciting storytelling, Schwabe at once advances debates in memory and migration studies through a labor of synthesis. On one hand, the book offers a clear contribution to memory studies by uniting questions of the spatial and temporal dimensions of remembering and forgetting. On the other hand, the book demonstrates the coexistence of transnational processes of identity formation and retention with diasporic engagements between “migrant” and “host” communities. As communities in Chile and around the world grapple with how to process, respond to, and remember the ongoing violence in Palestine, the concept of moving memory offers a way to grapple with the changing and uncertain dimensions of history as it is made. To conclude with Schwabe’s words, “the idea that memory moves within and between people, times, and spaces urges us to take note of how the past is sought to be confined and released, held in place or let go to travel where it may” (p. 120).