Hiner Introduccion

Women's History Review
ISSN: 0961-2025 (Print) 1747-583X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20
‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral

histories of female members of the MIR in Chile
through the work of Luisa Passerini
Hillary Hiner
To cite this article: Hillary Hiner (2015): ‘Memory Speaks from Today’: analyzing oral histories
of female members of the MIR in Chile through the work of Luisa Passerini, Women's History
Review, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2015.1071566
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2015.1071566
Published online: 26 Oct 2015.
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‘Memory Speaks from Today’:

analyzing oral histories of female
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members of the MIR in Chile through

the work of Luisa Passerini
Hillary Hiner
This article engages the work of Luisa Passerini in order to analyze the oral histories of
women who belonged to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) in Chile
during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a theoretical framework that considers the
interplay between memory, testimony, and gender as well as a transnational historical
perspective can help explain how feminism and ‘new left’ groups emerged from the
revolutionary 1968 context. Of primary concern is the manner in which certain gen-
dered aspects of the MIR women’s experiences—particularly the brutal sexualized pol-
itical violence they endured at the hands of the state—have been historically silenced
and also how, more recently, women’s testimonials have helped to break that silence.
Finally, the article proposes that feminism, both as a mode of critical thinking and as a
social movement, will allow us to more fully ‘hear’ the testimonies of these women and
to understand how their memories are ‘speaking from today.’
Introduction
When Fascism in Popular Memory was first published in English in 1987, Luisa
Passerini was on the cusp of the historiographical vanguard.1 That ground-
Hillary Hiner is a feminist historian, PhD in History from the University of Chile. She is currently an Assistant
Professor in the History Department at the Universidad Diego Portales. Her research interests include: gender,
sexualities, feminism, violence, oral history, and memory in the context of Latin American and Chilean recent
history. Correspondence to: Dr Hillary Hiner, Universidad Diego Portales, Ejército 333, 18 Piso Santiago,
Chile. Email: hillary.hiner@udp.cl and hillaryhiner@hotmail.com
# 2015 Taylor & Francis

2 H. Hiner
breaking oral history study (and the articles that preceded it) offered us a rich cul-
tural history before we completely understood what cultural history meant; it pro-
vided an innovative approach to oral history methodology when we were just
beginning to define the parameters of the field; and it interrogated the categories
of memory, gender, and class in a completely daring and innovative way. Passer-
ini’s declaration that ‘[t]he form that the interview takes . . . is more concerned
with drawing out forms of cultural identity and shared traditions than with the
factual aspects of social history’ made her part of a select group of scholars who
dared to question the very nature of the positivist foundations of modern
history.2 By applying this insight, Passerini’s assessment of the interviews con-
ducted with working-class men and women in Turin opened up a whole series
of questions about the role that culture played in the support for as well as resist-
ance to fascism in Italy. Her work also highlighted the ways in which workers’
responses to fascism were profoundly gendered. When, in particular, Passerini
spoke, so famously, of the role of the woman ‘rebel’ in the Italian resistance move-
ment to fascism,3 and of the ‘homoerotic’ aspects of the 1968 student movement
in Turin,4 she paved the way for new, gendered understandings of the interplay
between gender, class, and agency in left movements during the twentieth century.
In this article, I draw upon Passerini’s work to analyze the oral histories con-
ducted with women who participated in the extreme left, armed group el Movi-
miento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR)
during the 1970s in Chile and who were later tortured as a result.5,6 In particular,
I focus on these female survivors’ memories in relation to three main questions:
(1) Why did they join the MIR and how did they relate, as women, to armed
struggle and violence? (2) How do they remember gender differences within the
MIR and how do sexual and affective relationships come into play within these
memories? (3) What are the principal silences that we observe in these testimonies
and how and why are they produced? Before tackling these questions, I provide a
brief historical and theoretical overview as well as a limited transnational analysis
of ‘new left’ movements in both Chile and Italy, in the process drawing out explicit
comparisons between Passerini’s work and my own.
Gendering Recent History and Political Violence in Latin America

Between the September 11, 1973 military coup and the return to formal democ-
racy on March 10, 1990—when the elected Christian Democratic president, Patri-
cio Aylwin, assumed office—many hundreds of thousands of Chilean men,
women, and children were affected, directly and indirectly, by state terrorism.
This included instances of political persecution (in work and school settings as
well as more generally), purges of people associated with the left from universities
and state agencies, physical, psychological, and sexual torture, forced disappear-
ance, political execution, political prison, and exile. Authoritarian repression
impacted with particular brutality on members of far-left, Guevarist-inspired
armed groups, such as the MIR, and on traditional socialist political parties,
such as the Communist (PC) and Socialist Parties (PS), which had enjoyed a
Women’s History Review 3
long and storied history of political participation in Chile up until the coup. His-
torically, leftist parties, armed groups, and trade unions have been associated with
hegemonic, heterosexual masculinity in Latin America, but large numbers of
Chilean women also participated in the PS, PC, and MIR, especially during Salva-
dor Allende’s Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, UP) government from 1970 to
1973. Scholars, such as Gwynn Thomas and Margaret Power, have underscored
the manner in which politics on both the left and right was heavily gendered
during the UP period, although the proper role of the woman as wife and
mother was scarcely questioned.7 At the same time, the increased participation
of women in left-leaning groups, as both ‘militantes’ and ‘simpatizantes,’8 meant
that the coup itself would affect them in direct, and often horrifically, gendered
ways that were also meant to reaffirm the ‘natural’ gendered order of the tra-
ditional Catholic family. For this same reason, it was extremely common for
sexual torture to be used on female political prisoners during the dictatorship
years.
From at least the mid 1980s on, a varied feminist literature on the gendered
aspects of political violence in Latin America began to appear, much of it based
on the testimonies of women who experienced political prison, torture, and,
most commonly, exile. In her 1985 text, ‘Surviving Beyond Fear,’ Ximena
Bunster, for example, spoke of torture as being brutally ‘feminized’ in Chile
through state use of sexual violence. The torture of women for their political
beliefs and in order to gain information and learn the whereabouts of those
close to them revealed that ‘the more generalized and diffused female sexual ensla-
vement through the patriarchal state has been crystallized and physically literalized
through the military state as torturer.’9 In earlier articles and in her posthumously
published 1986 book, Chilean feminist theorist Julieta Kirkwood also noted the
interlocking nature of patriarchy and authoritarianism, highlighting the manner
in which gendered violence and ‘machismo’ permeated Chilean culture and
society. She brilliantly summarized her thesis in her now well-known turn of
phrase calling for ‘democracia en el paı́s y en la casa’ (‘democracy in the country
and in the home’).10
Still, the 1980s and 1990s was less a time for reflexive contemplation of memory
and gender (that would emerge much later) than for ‘denuncia.’ The testimonies
recorded in these years tend to focus on the need to make ‘visible’ the long-
silenced and denied cruelties of state terrorism. Many women participated
orally in these denuncias at local, regional, and international levels and in different
group-based forums and press activities, such as that of the United Nations, left-
leaning groups and trade unions, international and national human rights and
feminist groups, and special networks of exiles and their allies around the
world.11 During the 1985 Feminist Encuentro en Brazil, one Chilean woman
remembered how ‘[t]he painful nostalgia for a united and free Chile [that] predo-
minated at this meeting [became] particularly evident when the exiled Chilenas
began to tell their stories. For them it was a way to reconnect with their history.
For the rest, this sorrow opened up the unhealed wound of the loss and absence
of so many compatriots, some gone forever.’12 From the late 1970s on, and with
4 H. Hiner
considerably more frequency during the 1990s, a series of women’s testimonial

accounts of state violence also began to be published, most famously that of Rigo-
berta Menchú in Guatemala, but also those of other women in the Americas who
had experienced political violence first-hand.13 These denuncias, and the testimo-
nio genre more generally, are based on life histories that dedicate significant por-
tions of their narrative to women’s experiences of suffering as victims of political
violence, and, also, at times, as victims of intimate partner or family violence.
Done in order to ‘shine a light’ on the tragic consequences of state terrorism on
women’s lives, the testimonials were often conducted in contexts of an incipient
‘nunca más’ discourse related to human rights violations. To varying degrees,
they highlight as well the gendered instances of resistance and organization to

this violence. What is not usually discussed in much detail is the woman’s own pol-
itical militancy or her relation to armed struggle, as this would seem to ‘weaken’
the overall denuncia effect of promoting awareness through victimhood (a point to
which I return below).
It would not be until the early twenty-first century, however, that a more
nuanced and detailed study of women’s participation in leftist groups would
emerge in Latin America. This is clearly due in part to the accumulation of scho-
larly works related to memory studies, oral history, and recent history. The
massive Social Science Research Council (SSRC)-funded project on memory in
the Southern Cone and Peru undertaken during the late 1990s and early
2000s—wherein senior scholars, such as Elizabeth Jelin, Eric Hershberg, Steve
Stern and Carlos Iván Degregori, mentored younger researchers and PhD students
working on topics related to memory and recent history—produced a boom in
Latin American memory studies. The accumulated work of these academics,
and that of cultural studies scholars (like Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo, and
Hugo Vezzetti), built upon earlier investigations into memory in European con-
texts, such as those completed by Luisa Passerini, Alessandro Portelli, and
Maurice Halbwachs. Together, this scholarship has increased immensely our com-
prehension of the ‘making’ of collective memory and how it is represented in oral
forms, though, alas, many younger Latin American historians lack access to
Spanish translations of European scholars’ earlier and key texts (since translation
can be inconsistent and is often extremely tardy).14 This is unfortunate because, as
I detail below, incorporating Passerini’s insights into current investigations of
gender and memory in Chile greatly improves our understanding of the recent
past.
Another critically important factor is the campaign for truth and justice in the
Southern Cone. As the search for truth and justice has continued into the new
century, an increasingly dynamic and fluid relationship has emerged between
new truth commissions, trials, and social movement activism focused on ‘visibi-
lizing’ gendered and sexualized violence of the past. For example, in Chile, the
2004 National Commission on Political Prison and Torture Report (or Valech
Report) included a specific section on women and sexual torture, thereby promot-
ing its discussion.15 This documented evidence has not only increased gender
awareness within human rights groups and memory sites, but also prompted
new judicial action by survivors who have sued state agents for past sexual torture
(Herrera in 2010) and sexual violence (Ayress, Holzapfel, Castillo, and Brito in
2014).16 Similar developments occurred in Argentina: since the 2001 formation
of the non-governmental organization (NGO) ‘Memoria Abierta’, the human
rights organization has consistently conducted interviews with women survivors
and collected information on sexual torture for their oral archive, publishing a
study of this work in 2011 as Y nadie querı́a saber (And Nobody Wanted to
Know). Increased awareness is also evident in recent human rights trials.
Indeed, it played a key role in the 2010 conviction of Gregorio Molina, the
former head of the Air Force Base in Mar de Plata, Argentina for the repeated
raping of three female political prisoners, among other crimes (including thirty-
six cases of torture and two of homicide).17 The subject of gendered and sexualized
violence has been explored as well through the inauguration, in 2011, of the Sexual
Diversity Memory Archive (SDMA) housed in Argentina’s National Memory
Archive, which is located on the memory site of the ex-Escuela Mécanica de la
Armada, a notorious detention center. The SDMA will collect and archive infor-
mation on human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship with a
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) dimension; for example,
trans women arrested for prostitution during the dictatorship and then taken to
clandestine detention centers and tortured.18 Recent trials and truth commissions
in Peru, Guatemala, and Brazil have similarly activated new discussions about
gender violence and sexual torture committed in Cold War contexts.19
Through such efforts, a growing number of texts have been produced since the
mid 2000s on the gendered nature of leftist political parties in the 1970s—particu-
larly that of the Guevarist armed groups—and on how women, as subversive
‘guerrilleras,’ were brutally tortured by state agents due to their political affiliation
and gendered ‘transgressions’ (being ‘bad mothers,’ not staying at home to fulfil
their duties, participating in Marxist ‘anti-family’ politics, etc.).20 Significantly,
many female academics with feminist leanings have also been quick to note the
myriad ways in which hegemonic masculinity and heteronormative, patriarchal
values also underscored much of the 1960s Guevarist discourse on the ‘New
Man,’ based as it was on a romanticized, heroic version of the Argentine revolu-
tionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.21 So, too, have they observed the often extremely
androcentric nature of new left discourse. As Marta Zabaleta pointed out in an
early text: ‘We know something about the “new man” who so inspired Che
Guevara. But even his writings and experience tell us little about what is to be
expected of the new woman. Is she expected to take up arms, or to move to the
polls to preserve the balance of power in a moment of political crisis, only to
return to the role of a traditional woman as soon as the crisis is past?’22
What we can take away from this literature is that any members of the ‘Genera-
ción del 68′ in Latin America tended to conform to traditional heterosexual gender
norms, though there was often considerable tension between this generation and
their parents and elders. While some of these differences were political, others were
cultural, exacerbated by the media perception of this generation as unruly, blue
jeans-wearing, rock and roll-listening, drug-taking, sexually active youth.23 In
6 H. Hiner
some respects, this was a banal stereotype challenged by left-leaning youth them-
selves, as radical leftist militants dismissed the drugs and rock-and-roll lifestyle as
bourgeois, hippie, imperialist nonsense, favoring instead the revolutionary, politi-
cally charged lyrics of the Nueva Canción singer-songwriters, like Chileans Victor
Jara, Quilapayún, Inti-Illmani (and their earlier predecessor, the great Violeta
Parra), Argentinians Atahualpa Yupanqui and Mercedes Sosa, or the Cubans
Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés. Despite such differences in youth culture,
however, there was undoubtedly an important transnational aspect to the 68 Gen-
eration in Latin America, one which greatly admired the 1959 Cuban Revolution
and believed fervently that deep structural changes were necessary and urgent, so
urgent, in fact, that the use of violence might be necessary. The next section con-
siders some of the possible transnational linkages between the Chilean and Italian
68 Generation as seen through the lens of gender and sexuality.
Revolution and the ‘I want to be an orphan’ Generation:24 transnational analysis of

the ‘new left’ and gender in Chile and Italy
At first glance, it might seem ‘naı̈f ’ to suppose a cross-cultural, transnational 1968
historical experience, as the Argentinean Hugo Vezzetti made vividly clear when,
speaking at a conference dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of that year, he
declared: ‘There was no global 1968, and all attempts to press this date into one
political or historical framework, either during the events or afterwards, are unten-
able.’25 But while any attempt to force events related to 1968 into exactly the same
historical framework would indeed be ‘untenable,’ my analysis suggests that some
insight can be wrought from adopting a more transnational and comparative
approach to the late 1960s and early 1970s in Latin America. The effort is particu-
larly important given that recent histories within Latin American countries have
also tended to be national histories, with very little comparative or transnational
analysis even within Latin America, let alone to other world regions. That which
does exist has tended to focus either on the political and cultural interpretations
of the French May 1968 uprising within student and new left movements in
Latin America, particularly in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico,26 or, on a transna-
tional analysis of how these left-leaning political projects were brutally dismantled
through the imposition, backed by the USA, of right-wing authoritarian dictator-
ships in the Southern Cone.27
It is surprising, given the somewhat similar cultural patterns and large
migratory populations evident in both regions, that few comparisons have been
drawn between recent history in Southern Europe and the Southern Cone
outside of the obvious comparison with Spain, though even this work is primarily
focused on transition to democracy and post-authoritarian societies.28 Compari-
sons between Chile and Italy, although difficult to come by,29 are particularly
worthwhile given that the 1960s era in both nations exhibited certain similar
social and political components. Politically, for example, both countries had the
presence of large Christian Democratic parties (Democrazia Cristiana in Italy
and Partido Demócrata Cristiano in Chile) that proposed modernization
without socialist revolution during the 1960s as well as large and historically
important communist parties (the Partito Comunista Italiano and Partido Comu-
nista de Chile were the most important communist parties in Europe and Latin
America, respectively) that were nevertheless viewed as a largely parliamentary
and ‘moderate’ left during the 1960s and 1970s. Both countries witnessed as
well the emergence of ‘new left’ political parties in the wake of 1960s student
movements and reforms, such as Avanguardia Operaia (Workers’ Vanguard,
1968), Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle, 1969), and Potere Operaio
(Workers’ Power, 1969) in Italy; and, in Chile, the Movimiento de la Izquierda
Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement, MIR, 1965), and Movimiento de
Acción Popular Unitaria (Unitary Popular Action Movement, MAPU, 1969).

Such parallel party developments should not surprise us, given the Cold War
context, and the resulting US-backed support of Christian Democratic parties
in Europe and the Americas as well as the global inspiration provided by the
1959 Cuban Revolution. The latter energized and motivated youth to question tra-
ditional leftist politics—and even criticize, albeit in a much more limited manner,
Soviet, Stalinist influence—and propose new revolutionary paths to socialism. In
both national contexts, these paths were also explored through new innovations
stemming from Vatican II and the rise of liberation theology. The cultural and pol-
itical exchange during this era was such that many of these radical paths to liber-
ation were not based solely on European experiences but had strong roots in Latin
America as well. ‘Finally,’ the historian Paul Ginsborg observes, ‘events in South
America completed the ‘Third World’ inspirations of the student movement,’
adding: ‘The death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in the autumn of 1967 provided
the Italian students, as it did the French and German, with their single greatest
hero. But in Italy the teachings of radical South American priests who sought to
reconcile Catholicism and Marxism found a particular resonance. Not by
chance, the first revolts in Italian universities were to be in strongly Catholic
institutions.’30
Youth culture and university attendance was also on the rise in both countries
during this period, and this too helped to modify (to a certain extent) prevailing
norms regarding gender and sexuality. By contrast, while in both countries Cath-
olicism played a key role in bolstering traditional gender and familial norms—
specifically the prevailing notion of the heterosexual union and the woman as
wife and mother—changes in this sphere occurred much more quickly and
were much more readily accepted in the European than in the Latin American
context, largely due to a strong feminist movement presence in the former. Signifi-
cantly, many of the Italian feminists of the 1970s came out of the 1968 student
movement experience, and some even out of extra-parliamentary leftist groups
(Lotta Continua, for example, is well known as a sort of seed bed for activists
who later identified as feminist).31 In either case, it is very common in Italy for
feminists of this generation to have passed through leftist political organizations,
and, therefore, to have developed a more nuanced appraisal of the relationship
between class and gender than is generally found in some western feminisms
(although the dynamics of race and sexuality were rather belatedly introduced).
8 H. Hiner
Here, again, we can find parallels (as well as differences) with Chile. Some women
from the extra-parliamentary left in Chile, primarily the MIR, also became
feminists, but in a later and quite different context. For them, the 1973 coup
d’état and the subsequent experience of political imprisonment, torture, and
exile directly affected their conversion to feminism.32 Moreover, for both con-
texts, we should also remember that while Italian and Chilean women in the
1970s increasingly left the home to work and study outside it, and some
even became feminists, the maternal ideology still enjoyed hegemony. As
Maude Bracke says of this era, ‘in Italy women were not as employed as
much as in UK, France or West Germany [ . . . and] Catholicism contributed
to a deeply embedded mystification of motherhood. Despite the fact that

Italy following 1945 became increasingly secular, idealised notions of mother-
hood were more powerful than ever.’33
Equally important are the major differences between the two countries. We
cannot overlook, for example, the tremendous effect that Mussolini’s fascism,
the Second World War, and the Resistance continued to have on Italian politics
during the second half of the twentieth century, just as we cannot forget the
truly revolutionary and unique project that was Salvador Allende’s ‘peaceful
path’ to socialism in Chile during the Popular Unity government of the early
1970s. Also, the very nature of armed struggle is historically interpreted and
remembered in very different ways in the two countries. In Italy, the ‘hot
autumn’ of 1969 signaled the move from student movement to more organized
extra-parliamentary groups, thus following similar Latin American trajectories,
but the emergence of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) in 1970 and Prima Linea
in 1976 (an armed splinter group of members of Lotta Continua and Potere
Operaio) is generally associated with negative memories related to terrorism and
the ‘lead years’ (anni di piombo). The Red Brigades’ kidnapping and assassination
of Christian Democrat, and former prime minister, Aldo Moro in March 1978 is
generally viewed as the endpoint of a historic compromise between the Christian
Democrats and the Italian Communist Party, as well as the beginning of a strong
political persecution of ‘new left’ armed groups, now viewed by the majority of
Italians as ‘terrorists’ (largely because these groups committed high-profile politi-
cal acts of kidnapping, bombing, robbery, and assassination during a period of
democratic rule, or at least, not a dictatorship).
In Chile, the new left, and particularly the MIR, developed and operated in
somewhat different ways. While the MIR did carry out armed operations in
Chile, such as armed robberies, planting explosive devices, and even some killings
(carried out in context of armed confrontations with state agents), these were
much more limited in scope and the MIR did not look to overthrow Allende’s
democratic government; on the contrary, they supported it, even though they
questioned the timing of reforms (too slow) and the government’s naiveté (too
trusting of the military). In addition, the scale of the authoritarian repression
that followed the 1973 coup was so large and brutal that it makes the MIR’s
armed operations seem quite limited in comparison. For all of the MIR’s militar-
istic rhetoric, they were unable to organize any type of effective and prolonged
armed resistance on September 11, for instance, with the partial exceptions of La
Legua neighborhood and the cordones industriales, neither of which could resist for
very long. Instead, the names of former MIR members are now largely remem-
bered in relation to state terrorism and the disappeared because, percentage-
wise, this group suffered the heaviest losses during the dictatorship. It also explains
why former MIR members are among the most active participants in current
memory and reparations struggles.
The Compañera Conundrum: women, violence, and leadership positions in the

MIR
Our understanding of gender and revolutionary politics can benefit from greater
transnational study, and here I offer not a sustained comparison of far-left women
in Italy and Chile, but rather use Passerini’s ground-breaking work on gender,
memory, and revolutionary social movements in Italy—1968: autobiography of a
generation—to evaluate key aspects of the testimonials conducted with MIR
women in Chile.
Passerini’s observations regarding the Turin student movement’s attitude
towards violence during the late 1960s also applies to the Chilean context. ‘Our
violence seemed to us merely a response,’ she writes, adding: ‘For us the idea of
violence—I’m not talking about its exercise—was acceptable on another level as
well: our heroes from the anti-Fascist Resistance to the third-world revolutionaries
had made use of it, and precisely on this point they distinguished themselves from
the moderates.’ She and her cohort also ‘took for granted that sooner or later it
would be necessary to resort to violence, as the history of all revolutions taught
. . . . No one perceived the connection between socialism (or profound political
and social innovation, however one might define it) and democracy as indispen-
sable.’34 Similarly, in Latin America, it was increasingly argued that the very nature
of democracy itself, particularly representative democracy, could be called into
question as too limiting, as not promoting the formation of more equal societies.
One might have expected to see less sympathy towards armed struggle during the
time of a democratically elected socialist government, but the MIR viewed the
election of Allende as in need of protection. The MIR’s participation in the for-
mation of Allende’s own personal armed guard (Grupo de Amigos Personales,
GAP) and the decision to try to arm the industrial corridor in Santiago (los cor-
dones industriales) reflected the perception that Allende could be easily over-
thrown by a traitorous military allied with right-wing interests and the CIA.
This perception only grew in the months leading up to the September 11 coup.
Many women who were interviewed remembered this as a distinctive bonus to
joining the MIR: it was an organization that had ‘las cosas claras’; as both an ideo-
logical, new left alternative to the traditional political left of the PS and PC (the last
still associated with the Stalinist, pro-Soviet line) and also a party that was willing
to ‘put its money where its mouth was’ with respect to the socialist revolution,
taking up arms if necessary to protect Allende’s socialist ‘Chilean way’ to
revolution.
10 H. Hiner
Traditionally, women are not expected to participate in warfare, or manipulate

weapons. Although women did participate, and with great fanfare, in the 1959
Cuban Revolution, as K. Lynn Stoner has argued, these women were usually held
up as loyal guardians of the patriarchal Cuban state, ‘as examples of the ultimate
compañeras—women willing to die not only for their own compañeros, but for the
comandante en jefe and the Revolution.’35 However, in Chile during the 1970s
women were not generally included in the sphere of the military or warfare,
beyond a merely administrative or auxiliary capacity, and they were largely excluded
from military or paramilitary actions, even if part of armed groups.36 During this
time in Chile, both the PC and PS parties largely adhered to the possibility of
change through the ballot box and parliamentary negotiations. The MIR, on the
other hand, was a political organization which proposed action from a number of
fronts, both public and clandestine. As early as 1967, the MIR organized a
number of clandestine paramilitary groups (grupos paramilitares, GPM), which
served as regional, territorial organizations. For example, there were thirteen
GPMs in the southern Bio-Bio Region and four GPMs in this region’s capital city,
Concepción, where the MIR first originated.37 GPMs had their own internal hierar-
chy, also reproduced in the central MIR command, wherein political, logistical, and
communicational duties were distributed by rank. At the apex was the General Sec-
retary—associated with Miguel Enrı́quez, who presided over the MIR during its
best-known period and up until his death in 1974—which deliberated in conjunc-
tion with the National Secretariat and the Central Committee, made up of the
MIR elite, the ‘crème de la crème’ of the militantes, imbued with vertical, hierarchical
rank and paramilitary training on the use of weapons, the confection of explosive
devices, and other guerrilla warfare tactics. From 1970 on, the MIR’s GPMs also
worked to build more public instances of mass organization, known as the ‘Frente
intermedios de masas,’ which were organized along social movement and trade
unionist lines. Some examples include: the Revolutionary Students’ Front (Frente
de Estudiantes Revolucionarios, FER) based in the schools and universities; the
Leftist Student Movement (Movimiento Universitario de Izquierda, MUI), as it was
primarily called in Concepción; the Revolutionary Workers’ Front (Frente de Traba-
jadores Revolucionarios, FTR) in the trade unions; the Revolutionary Shantytown
Residents’ Front (Frente de Pobladores Revolucionarios, FPR); and the Revolutionary
Peasants’ Front in the countryside (Frente de Campesinos Revolucionarios, FCR,
also known as the Revolutionary Peasant Movement or Movimiento Campesino
Revolucionario, MCR). There was even a Revolutionary Women’s Front (Frente de
Mujeres Revolucionarias, FMR), although it was a very small group based in
Concepción. Recently there has been more historical interest shown in the FMR,
but to date very little has been published about it in MIR-related bibliography.
However, the use of a strict cellular structure and the fact that the MIR was a
clandestine, illegal organization for much of its existence from 1965 on, meant
that many miristas from this period generally cultivated a ‘covert’ aspect to their
militancy, having to hide their participation or obscure the exact nature of their
political actions, even from their closest friends and family. Women who became
militants in the MIR, especially those who managed to move up the organizational
hierarchy, have a certain pride in their political-military abilities and see themselves
as being ‘chosen’ from within the MIR for their positive characteristics. One mirista
woman, for example, who entered the MIR through her work with the FTR at her
government public sector job, clearly differentiated between how the PC and the
MIR recruited their members, putting much emphasis on the topic of ‘selection’:
. . . well because of their make-up one is a party of the masses and the other is a
party with a cell structure, different ways of governing . . . the mass aspect is
from the family, from tradition, for example almost all the Communist families,
all of them are going to be PC, yeah? And a cell structure chooses its cells; you
have to meet certain requirements for them. It’s not that, for example . . . in my
family, for example, I could have ended up a Christian Democrat or whatever

but the MIR demanded certain requirements for each of us. So that’s the differ-
ence; and the PC no. The PC is a mass party, in terms of level, and mass from the
family as well. I think that from a PC family it’s difficult that someone emerges
that isn’t [PC]—it exists of course—but it’s difficult that it’s not the case.38
Another woman, Lily Rivas, a history teacher who was extremely active in the MIR
from its foundation in Concepción, speaks to the ambivalence she felt in her role
as a woman who spoke publicly for the MIR but who did not herself participate in
military training and the use of armed struggle. Yet, she understood how the possi-
bility of participation in armed struggle and in clandestine operations which,
because they often involved a group of miristas masquerading as an extended
family or young couples living in a safe house, necessitated the presence of
women and even children to sell the ‘façade,’ could appeal to some women, par-
ticularly as it broke with prevailing gender norms:
And in our case, in the case of the MIR, there was . . . the tremendous attraction
of, of taking up arms, or of the . . . I would say, symbolically, the arms, well, ehm,
the work, the clandestine work, the work of, of defense and self-defense, that
whole world that, historically, they have always said that women don’t belong
to. Of course, if we dig into historical experience, in some way women have par-
ticipated in, in ways, let’s say, right? . . . women are always in that clandestinity,
because they represent determined eh resources in that clandestinity eh with,
obviously, with risks, with the same risks that run . . . well the risks that run
the men, but women have been more . . . we run the risk that because of our
condition as women that we will be attacked as women by the enemy right?
That was the problem with the sexual aggressions in the . . . repression. So . . .
there were many women who really moved into those spaces. But in the direc-
tives I have always felt that we weren’t there, we didn’t assume those roles. I’m
telling you, we didn’t assume [those roles]. I, I was terrified of being able to have
some responsibility, I always had a, a, a what’s it called? An, an excuse for myself
(laughs) ‘well I work, well I have to do this, well . . . ’ I was a woman that lived
like any other person right? So belonging to the MIR was like very measured,
and I participated to the degree that my lifestyle permitted me to, right? But,
generally, not very many women assumed eh . . . leadership roles. But it
wasn’t like that for the women that assumed roles in clandestine spaces, prepar-
ing self-defense, the defense and all those things eh in which I never got into
(laughs), I always excused myself from that right? ‘But you have to learn to
shoot,’ ‘Ah, yes, but look, once I wanted to shoot’ because in the countryside
it was . . . the arms were hung up next to the hats and the ponchos, eh, I was
12 H. Hiner
never really very friendly with all that and the time I tried to do that I was
pushed back and fell down and no, no, no this is not my thing (laughs), my
father insisted that no, that I not give up. So, then, I excused myself . . . and
then I was always in the, in the thing . . . not in the directive but rather in the
intermediate actions. But always persisting, right? And the public work right?
and the public work.39
This quotation from Lily also references the gendered nature of MIR leadership,
wherein men primarily assumed the leadership roles, particularly in militarized,
armed struggle. Passerini’s observations about the homoerotic nature of the
Turin student movement applies as well to the MIR. ‘It was much easier for
men to acknowledge feelings of love for the leaders, who, for the most part,
were also men,’ she writes, ‘than it was for the women to discover and accept
new forms of female authority. There were numerous women in intermediate
cadres positions, but very few in leadership positions, and they evoked mixed feel-
ings of envy and emulation in the other women. At the same time, as various
accounts confirm, they represented a model that was not wholly desirable
because of its implicit rejection of traditional femininity.’40 It is difficult to under-
score just how similar the case was in Chile, the result perhaps of similar Catholic
traditions. One of the great historical myths surrounding the MIR since the dic-
tatorship in Chile is that the women who participated in the MIR did so only
as compañeras of male MIR members, thereby erasing their own political
agency.41 Interestingly, the compañera myth has also divided the MIR women
themselves, who take pains to stress their own political formation and generally
look down upon women where really were ‘only’ compañeras. How these
women demarcate themselves as truly ‘political’ and the other women as merely
compañeras can be quite subtle. In Lily’s interview, for example, she polices the
‘compañera’ boundary, while at the same time, rescuing the positive qualities
and political commitment of the compañeras, and grouping all women of the
MIR into a discriminated group, that of women, as read from a feminist lens:
I feel that we were a lot of women in the MIR, there were a lot of women in the
MIR. Eh and an important number of us came to be militants because of our
own decisions, not because we were ‘las compañeras de’ (interviewer: Right).
That doesn’t mean that there weren’t women who were ‘las compañeras de’.
Eh, although some of them, women with a lot of protagonism, with a lot of
their own qualities right? Eh, and I have always thought that, eh, this great quan-
tity of women was due not only to the critical consciousness of the, of the, eh,
differences, of the social injustices . . . but also due to the discrimination that,
ehm, that we suffered as women. Women, the 60s eh, were a time in which
women had been given the right to vote . . . but we were still stuck in the
same situation as always, right? The marriage law continued to be the same,
in which the husband was the administrator of the women’s property [etc.].42
However, another mirista woman, Edelmira Carrillo, who was employed as a social
worker in the National Health Service in the southern city of Valdivia and partici-
pated in the FTR as such, is much more critical of how the men within the MIR
conceptualized the role of women and how the compañeras were inserted into lea-
dership roles, often without the proper ideological training:
Look, the men in the MIR were very patriarchal, eh, I think that abuse, or, how
would I call it? The shamelessness of having two, three, four compañeras, going
out with one and then the other, of cheating, it was a topic that we also had to
work on, us women. Because sometimes women like to make themselves into
victims and no, we’re not victims, we’re women and, how would I put it? We
are the principal actors in our own lives, and so we have to really be clear
that if I participated in an affair with some compañero that today bothers me,
then I assume it also, no, no, I’m not going to play stupid, I assume it and I
am responsible no? It’s not ‘they tricked me,’ no; they didn’t trick us. But, of
course the compañeros with two, three compañeras, you know what I mean?
So they were playing the field and the tragedies of love that one saw and all
that. I always said, but why all the suffering? Where’s this ‘new man’ that Che
was talking about? No? And all those sins of a patriarchal, machista society
that we all carry with us no? Everything that’s in our consciousness, eh, that
worked to either accept it or leave or separate and well, the positions, the pos-
itions of rank in the MIR, it was not going to be any old little girl, no, they were
for the girlfriends of the compañeros, ‘las compañeras de los compañeros’ no? Very
badly chosen, because I don’t know if within that if there was some profound
political calling . . . because I understand that torture must have destroyed
Marcia Merino no? But she talked . . . Miguel Enrı́quez was an extraordinarily
intelligent man, but he also came from a patriarchal home, machista even if the
university chancellor Enriquez43was a wonderful man, university chancellor in
our times, a man that gave everything for liberty, that supported the democra-
tization process, and being all that, but, even so, in the house it was different, in
the families it was different, do you know what I mean?44
Edelmira’s testimonies suggest two main criticisms, made possible only through a
shared memory of what came afterwards in the dictatorship. First, she questions
the manner in which sexual intrigues could have hurt morale within the MIR,
and posits that there was an inherently machista disrespect shown towards
women, as male MIR leaders maintained multiple secretive relations with
women in the party. She does not let women off the hook, stressing that it is
not sufficient to ‘play the victim,’ but her basic view is that such behaviors wea-
kened the party. Nor is it coincidental that she mentions Marcia Merino immedi-
ately after voicing her criticism. Originally from Concepción, Merino, or ‘La Flaca
Alejandra’ (‘skinny Alexandra’), entered the MIR through the university. Even-
tually one of the three highest ranking female members of the MIR, along with
Lumi Videla and Gladys Dı́az, Merino headed up the GPM-1 in the southern
neighbourhoods of Santiago. An ex-MIR militant recalls that she was ‘[a]lways
with a group of guys, her favorites, who received the privilege of her confidence.
She was a hard woman (dura) and didn’t have any life outside of the party. With
the high-ranking leaders, she was the opposite: caring and nice.’45 Merino was
detained, for the second time, on May 1, 1974 in Curicó, roughly four hours
south of Santiago. She was tortured in Curicó and in Santiago and, according
to her testimony, tried to pass a note to the MIR stating that she could not
resist torture much longer.46 Shortly afterwards, she was ‘broken’ under torture
(‘la quebraron’) and began to turn over to repressive agents of the DINA (Direc-
ción de Inteligencia Nacional, National Intelligence Directive) names and vital
information on the MIR. Merino ended up living in a special small house on
14 H. Hiner
the notorious Villa Grimaldi’s grounds with two other women who had also been
‘broken,’ Luz Arce and Alicia Uribe (alias ‘la Carola’).47 Before the 1973 coup,
Merino had been romantically involved with a MIR leader, while he was married
to another woman. It is widely believed that Merino turned this former lover into
the DINA, as he was detained on July 30, 1974, and he still figures on the list of
the disappeared.48 However, the point of Edelmira’s criticism is that women like
Merino were not well-chosen leaders, and perhaps had risen to their senior post
more through their relations with men, and by being compañeras, than through
their own merits and ideological conviction. So the second aspect of her criticism
is really aimed at those who talked (‘los/as delatores/as’). By giving up information
and turning over members of their own party—and even former friends and
lovers (perhaps because they were former lovers?)—these former members partici-
pated in the decimation of the MIR through torture and forced disappearance.
Reflections on Memory, Gender, and the MIR: silencing the ‘broken’ or breaking
the silence?
In Memory and Utopia, Passerini reminds us that silences are intrinsic to the
memory process, noting, for instance, that ‘there can be memory within silence
and memory through silence . . . memory is gendered and women’s memories
and silences recur through the specificities of their experiences in different
times and spaces.’49 Edelmira’s quotation above vividly illustrates the role that
silences play in the memory construction process of women who participated in
leftist political organizations. The silence, in this case, has to do with those who
‘talked,’ who turned on their own and committed the deepest form of betrayal.
This subject is extremely hard to broach, even in oral histories conducted more
than forty years after the military coup, because under the extreme physical
duress of torture most people ultimately gave up some information. In the best
cases, it might have been only useless information, such as former meeting
places that had been abandoned or ‘chapas’ (aliases) rather than concrete names
and identification. But what if someone went back to that meeting place? What
if those ‘chapas’ were used to extort others under torture? How much did one
have to talk in order to become a hated delator/a traitor? One former mirista
woman walked this thin line when she tried to distinguish between those who
may have given some information under torture and those who actively collabo-
rated and thus cannot be forgiven (‘los imperdonables’):
Torture is a barbarous instrument that, that can go to any extremes, it can even
make you talk no? The, the challenge there is how much you can hold out in that
situation. And how much you can withstand has to do with a lot of things, you
understand? With, with . . . things that go beyond if you are brave or not ah? It
has to do with a certain internal resistance that life has given you. If it hasn’t
given you that then it’s a really, really complicated problem no? Because some-
times people say that you had to have, like, ideological fortitude (said with a slight
smile; interviewer makes a sound of disbelief) in order not to break down. But,
above everything else, I think that you had to have within you a reserve of, of
belief in yourself (she touches her chest with the left hand) . . . I think another
lesson that you have to learn no? (‘of course’ replies interviewer) is that one thing
is talking (delatar) in order to be approved by people, or you understand? to con-
tribute to what they’re doing. And another thing is that someone, you know,
who is destroying themselves has to say something about someone, without
wanting for them to brought in or anything but just saying ‘yes he lived in
that place’ or I don’t know and that’s where it’s connected with what I was
saying before.50
In this discussion of what it meant to truly ‘talk,’ there are a number of levels of
silencing and insinuation. The first obvious silencing is that she herself does not
mention any specific names of those who are known ‘talkers’ or collaborators.
Knowing what we now know about Villa Grimaldi, where this woman was held,
it is possible that she is referring to the same women discussed above—Arce,
Merino or Uribe—but there were others. Is she speaking of someone in particular?
Of her own experience? It is difficult to say, since all discussion of this topic is see-
mingly beyond the pale, touching on what Giorgio Agamben has referred to as the
essential crux of the survivor paradox: who are the essential, primary witnesses?
Are they not those who ‘drowned’ and not those who were ‘saved,’ in the termi-
nology of Primo Levi? The Latin American and Chilean version of this paradox
is perhaps doubly cruel: if you survived, was it not because you talked or gave
up comrades? Or were not ideologically strong enough? Surely, this has been
one of the greatest stumbling blocks in the conformation of former political pris-
oners’ groups and the source of continuing suspicions and conflict.
Turning to the relationship between 70s-era leftist political organization in
Chile, feminism, and memory leads us to consider how women have started to
‘break the silence’ surrounding their own militancy and the sexual violence they
suffered. To begin the discussion, I offer two quotations, one from Passerini’s
work on the Turin student movement and the other from an interview done
with a mirista woman:
Luisa Passerini: Nineteen sixty-eight had posited the problem of women’s liber-
ation in a more urgent mode than before. This was its contribution. It was
impossible to turn back, either from emancipation or from the new forms of
oppression. The field of relationships among women was completely open,
because the student movement had often kindled rivalries, jealousies, envies.
But it had also highlighted the differences among women, something which
is always a basis for subjectivity-raising. What remained unresolved was the
big problem of love and respect among them . . . 51
Ester Hernández, university student in the FER in Talca at the time of the 1973
coup and current feminist activist in Concepción: I always say that we have to
contextualize because I can’t ask for, I don’t know, for compañeros from the 70s
to be, eh I would I put it?, so progressive in the sense of saying, ‘OK women have
. . . ’ the MIR, the MIR has to be understood from the point of view of, yes, they
incorporated women in many things, right? Now, that they were feminists . . .
we didn’t even talk about feminism back then! There wasn’t any, or at least
not that I remember. I don’t remember them even talking about it or anything.
And there were some voices here in Concepción, that belonged to women that
were in the MIR, right?, that talked about that kind of thing, afterwards we
16 H. Hiner
know about that because of the writings and due to some women . . . and they
said, OK, this is what is going on with women, they don’t let us . . . right? In the
domestic chores and the chores of serving coffee, secretary or of being . . . But,
looking at it in the general context of political parties, I think that the MIR
incorporated many women in their, in their tasks, even though they weren’t
that many, but, but there was a different outlook I would say, a different way
of treating you.52
What comparing these two observations makes clear is that second-wave feminism
did not affect Latin America at the same time or in the same context as it did in the
global North. Many scholars associate the rise of feminism in Europe and North
America with ‘new left’ political groups, student movements, anti-war protests,
and the emergence of a ‘free love’ hippie movement, but in Chile this was not
the case. Chile even differs in comparison with a country like Italy, whose feminist
movement arguably splits the difference between the North American and Latin
American models in that it was much more advanced than Chile in terms of
the sexual revolution and access to abortion (legalized in Italy in 1978), but,
like Chile, was also marked by strong traditional Catholic values that tended to
limit women’s access to employment outside of the home and to uphold the
ideal of wife and mother. Issues of reproductive health and abortion, in particular,
followed a different trajectory in Chile, where access to full abortion rights was
denied (and continues to be denied, with a significant clampdown due to restric-
tions introduced by the dictatorship in 1989). Oral contraceptives were largely
introduced to Chile in 1966 through US-backed family planning initiatives that
sought to control population growth and pave the way for greater development
while, at the same time, maintaining the traditional heteronormative family
order.53 Furthermore, with some notable exceptions—such as the feminist move-
ment activity that took place in the ‘Women’s Tower’ at the UNCTAD building in
Santiago, founded in 1971, and the formation of a small group of MIR women
associated with feminism, the Frente de Mujeres Revolucionarias, in Concepción
that same year—second-wave feminism itself was largely rejected in Chile
because of a series of complex, and often overlapping, reasons.54 One major
reason is that while a great deal of feminist activity occurred during the early
twentieth century, much of it focused on the organization of women workers
and women’s rights as well as the right to vote,55 during the 1960s and 1970s
many socialist and new-left organizations viewed the women’s issue as a secondary
concern. It was class, not gender, that mattered most, hence matters dealing with
women were primarily channeled through the traditional gender role of wife and
mother. In addition, many Chileans at the time associated second-wave feminism
with bourgeois, sexually promiscuous, imperialist, white Anglo-Saxon women.56
As Ester says, ‘We didn’t even talk about feminism back then!’ While the emphasis
on ‘we’ is meant to remind us that the lack of feminist discourse was not specific to
the left, it does include the MIR and other left-leaning groups of that period. The
year 1968 in Chile, then, did not posit the problem of women’s liberation in a par-
ticularly feminist manner, nor did it take up the topic of ‘women’s’ liberation as
gendered and thus inherently distinct from ‘men’s’ liberation.
Nevertheless, for reasons too many to explore fully in this article, but that
include patterns of migration and exile, feminist consciousness raising, and
female participation in human rights efforts, Chilean women did later turn to
transnational feminist discourses when the time came to explore their own experi-
ences of torture, and particularly sexual torture. In fact, it was largely because of
the emergence of transnational discourse on ‘violence against women’ in the late
1980s and early 1990s,57 as well as the publication of some denuncia testimonies
like Menchú’s, that such violence could be more openly discussed and made
‘understandable’ through the use of concepts like patriarchy, rape/sexual violence,
and sexual trauma. In assessing the collective memory of the 1968 generation in
Italy, a generation of which she is also a member, Passerini reminds us that,

‘[m]emory has recorded the repercussions: the suffering due to inequalities, frus-
trations endured or witnessed. But not only that. For memory speaks from today.
It speaks from the point of view of a constructed identity, a political identity in the
old sense of the term: a citizenship conferred and not easily canceled; a shared
identity, participation in the creation of one’s own life and in the invention of a
culture.’ ‘It is this identity,’ she continues, ‘that tries to create for itself a
memory and that must reinterpret the past,’ adding that ‘what attracts me is
memory’s insistence on creating a history of itself, which is much less and
perhaps somewhat more than a social history.’58
In my current work, I am particularly interested in how ‘memory speaks from
today.’ In Chile, many women who were members of leftist political organizations
in the 1970s now find themselves constructing their collective identities and citi-
zenship rights on the basis of a shared common experience of suffering and sur-
vival, made intelligible through a feminist discourse on gender violence. Many
of them speak of ‘finding feminism’ while in political prison or exile and
through collective analysis done with other women from similar political back-
grounds. Due to their own experiences with gendered and sexualized forms of vio-
lence, these feminists were also among the first in Chile to openly denounce
violence against women and to form feminist organizations that sought to
combat this type of violence, which was rampant in Chile and largely silenced
and treated with impunity. For example, the three former mirista women inter-
viewed in Concepción (Edelmira Carrillo, Ester Hernández, and Lily Rivas) all
currently identify as feminists and have been active for many years in local feminist
projects, particularly in areas related to violence against women. In this regard,
these women were extremely successful in using feminism, the denuncia of their
own testimonies, and memories of gendered authoritarian repression to highlight
the manner in which human rights were also women’s rights and to argue that one
of the most inalienable rights is that women should be able to live without vio-
lence. Still, we cannot forget that the topic of sexual torture was largely silenced
for many years in Chile, and that the situation has changed only in the last
decade. As Ester Hernández reminds us:
silence is what we were defined by and it defines, unfortunately, all these histori-
cal processes, of so many of these massacres. Because the victims can’t, how do
18 H. Hiner
they process it? What happens with that? . . . So the 40 year [anniversary of the
coup] started to open up recently, you see, a door, a window so that we can start
to talk. And the fact is that they are deeds that are so painful, so what happens is
that ehhh is that it’s painful, it’s shameful, you know? But the thing is that once
one starts to speak, or that once one’s started to speak and it begins to emerge in
the media, although many people said, ‘ah this is . . . ’ what’s it called? (inter-
viewer: like a morbid curiosity?) Like that, I don’t know, but one doesn’t take
it like that obviously, but rather as a ‘denuncia’ and something that you have
to do so that the rest know, let’s say, what happened, because in that silence,
in what is hidden away and not talked about, we could repeat the same history.59
Conclusion
I shall conclude by proposing that feminism is precisely what is needed in order to
combat the silences that we have explored in leftist women’s testimonies—silences
regarding the myth of the ‘compañera,’ the stigma of the delator/a traitor, and the
sexual violence that was experienced. In all these cases, silence has played a key and
complex role in the shaping of collective memory and recent history with regard to
women’s participation in leftist groups and armed struggle and their ensuing ‘pun-
ishment’ at the hands of repressive state agents. Female members of the MIR, for
example, have had to combat the perception (in society at large and in the MIR
itself) of themselves as being merely the ‘girlfriends’ of prominent male militants,
while also pushing back against negative stereotypes of women as weak traitors
who turned on their former compañeros and compañeras. What lies behind the
fear of women being ‘broken’ is the use of sexual violence, seen as both the ulti-
mate expression of political violence and a naturalized and ever-present danger
for female prisoners. ‘La mujer quebrada’—the ‘broken woman’—also has a
long and storied cultural history in Latin America, wherein sexual violence was
frequently used by the dominant racialized elite in order to subdue and
conquer female subordinates. The most well known example of this is la Malinche
in Mexico, who is referred to as ‘la chingada,’ literally the ‘fucked one,’ who as a
concubine of the conquistador Hernán Cortés, has symbolically represented a pro-
foundly gendered notion of ‘betrayal’ and the sexualized nature of foundational
violence. A similar scenario has played out on a much smaller scale in Chile,
wherein women like Merino and Arce have publicly spoken about how sexual
and physical violence drove them to betrayal and collaboration with the
DINA.60 Admitting to sexual violence carries the stigma not only of being phys-
ically humiliated, but also of possibly being ‘broken’ and thus of being criticized
as a lightweight ‘compañera’ without ‘ideological fortitude.’ At the same time,
leftist women were also demonized by the dictatorship itself as power-hungry,
masculinized (or overly sexualized), guerrilla warriors who abandoned their legit-
imate role as good wives and mothers in order to wreak havoc on society. Mirista
women who survived torture have openly resisted and adamantly questioned these
misogynist tropes, but the insidious manner in which these cultural constructs
operate and continue to circulate to the present day has nevertheless limited the
discursive spaces available for female survivors of torture and political imprison-
ment to affect their own healing.
In that sense, it should not surprise us that women have been reluctant to
discuss sexual torture in Chile, particularly in contexts like the 1990s, when
‘memory impasse’ and reconciliatory discourse held sway,61 and where it was
going to be difficult, even in the best of cases, to discuss the authoritarian repres-
sion of the past. However, it has been the feminist movement in Chile that has
consistently and forcefully continued to make visible the sexual violence of the
past, and to do so in a way that relates it to the gendered patriarchal heteronorma-
tive violence of the present. In doing so, feminism has helped to de-stigmatize the
violence as a ‘shaming’ device that keeps former female militants and survivors of
sexual torture silent. But memory work with female survivors is not only about
healing past traumas; it is also about visibilizing past, present, and future struggles.
As with any memory work, this must be done in an intergenerational context, so
that younger feminists can enter into conversations with their elders and share
experiences. Inspired by Passerini’s insistence on the need to construct interge-
nerational networks and feminist bonds of solidarity within memory work,62 I
will close with the following quotation from a young lesbian feminist from Con-
cepción, Marı́a Fernanda Barrera, who has worked closely with female ex-militants
and survivors of state terrorism, particularly in the context of the activities orga-
nized in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the coup in 2013:
. . . what happened last year, when we had our discussion forum, that didn’t
happen, it hasn’t happened in any other part of Chile. It happened here, and
we were more than sixty women between the ages of 11 and 82 that circulated
and we saw each other and we told each other our stories, we sang a lot, we did
bio-dance and we learned to know each other and love each other and we have
continued to be involved today in a great deal of intergenerational projects,
nourishing ourselves, the one from the other, we, from the experiences of the
elders, and they from our ideas and our energy and all that and we have been
exchanging and, so, I think that it is healing, really, really healing for them in
terms of the terrorism that they lived in their bodies . . . And I think that it
has had a totally positive effect on them, and for everyone and for the move-
ment, for feminism, for the feminism that we are doing here . . . For me there
is a before and after. Why? Because I can historically place myself. For me
that was really important, I could place myself historically in my feminism, I
could recognize myself, I could look back, look forward, and so, for me, person-
ally, it shook me to my core . . . 63
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following women who graciously agreed to be inter-
viewed for this project: Marı́a Fernanda Barrera, Edelmira Carrillo, Ester Hernán-
dez, and Lily Rivas. Without them, this article would truly not be possible. I am
also grateful to Anahı́ Moya, from the Oral Archive of Villa Grimaldi-Parque de
la Paz, for her invaluable help. Also of great importance to this ongoing project
are my research assistants: Marı́a José Azócar, Cata Flores, and Panchiba
20 H. Hiner
Barrientos. Finally, I thank Franca Iacovetta and Donna Gabaccia for all their hard
work helping to organize this special issue, and also Luisa Passerini herself for her
insightful comments on earlier versions of this article and for allowing me access
to the well-endowed library of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
Funding for this project was provided by the Chilean state grant Fondecyt
[11130088].
ORCID
Hillary Hiner http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3016-042X
Notes
[1] Luisa Passerini (1987) Fascism in Popular Memory: the cultural experience of the Turin
working class (London: Cambridge University Press).
[2] Ibid., p. 8.
[3] Ibid., p. 27.
[4] Luisa Passerini (1996) Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press), p. 84.
[5] This investigation used as a source of information the Villa Grimaldi Oral Archive
belonging to the Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi. The author thanks
the Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi for allowing her to access the col-
lection’s information. All results of this study are the responsibility of the author
alone and in no way reflect said Corporación.
[6] Methodological note: the oral histories that are used here come from two main
sources, both of which have been reviewed as part of an ongoing, state-financed
project (Fondecyt No. 11130088) on gender violence and public policy in Chile.
One is the Villa Grimaldi Oral Archive (see previous note), which is made up of
more than 200 interviews that were recorded onto DVDs and vary between one
and five hours in length. Interviews were done in the context of an ongoing
process of memory recuperation and commemoration, as Villa Grimaldi itself,
now a memory site (including archives, park area with some reconstructed build-
ings, and guided tours), is a former political prison, where many Chileans were tor-
tured, executed, or disappeared. Due to the constrictions of the archive and the
format, I am not able to access, necessarily, all of the information that I would so
choose, nor am I allowed to identify the interviewees beyond their surnames.
However, since the testimonies are videotaped I could follow and note body
language and vocal cues that enriched the textual analysis. I am grateful to this
archive for allowing me to use and cite their resources, and I am particularly
indebted to Anahı́ Moya for her invaluable help there. The other interviews were
done by myself in the locality of Concepción, Chile during July 2014. As part of
the ethical guidelines of this project, this article and all citations reproduced here
from my personal interviews have been revised and approved by the interviewees.
None of the subjects discussed participating directly in events in these interviews
which could be construed, under current Chilean law, as illegal, although many
did attest to human rights violations carried out by the military and other state
and civil agents upon their persons. I owe a debt of gratitude to those women
who agreed to be interviewed and appear in this article: Marı́a Fernanda Barrera,
Edelmira Carrillo, Ester Hernández, and Lily Rivas.
[7] Gwynn Thomas (2011) Contesting Legitimacy in Chile: familial ideals, citizenship,
and political struggle, 1970 – 1990 (University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press); Margaret Power (2002) Right-Wing Women in Chile: feminine power and
the struggle against Allende, 1964 –1973 (University Park, PA: Penn State University
Press); Margaret Power (2001) Defending Dictatorship: conservative women in
Pinochet’s Chile and the 1988 plebiscite, in Victoria González & Karen Kampwirth
(Eds) Radical Women in Latin America: left and right (University Park, PA: Penn
State University Press), pp. 299 –324.
[8] The MIR used a three-tier hierarchy to identify its members. On the bottom rung
were the ‘simpatizantes’ (1 month or less in MIR), followed by the ‘aspirantes’
(2 – 6 months in MIR), and finally, the more experienced, senior ‘militantes’ (6
months or more in MIR). Members generally could ascend in rank through partici-
pating in special MIR study programs or in certain political or operational missions.
It is also common that people who were not card-carrying members of the PC or
PS—or the ‘militantes’ of these parties who had strict party alliances—tended to
identify themselves as ‘simpatizantes’ of the left (or of these specific parties) in
oral histories, although the meaning here would not be as specific as in the MIR.
[9] Ximena Bunster (1985) Surviving Beyond Fear: women and torture in Latin
America, in June Nash & Helen Safa (Eds) Women and Change in Latin America
(South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey), pp. 297– 327, p. 297.
[10] Julieta Kirkwood ([1986] 1990) Ser Polı́tica en Chile: los Nudos de la Sabidurı́a Fem-
inista (Santiago:Editorial Cuarto Propio).
[11] There has been increasing scholarly attention paid to Chilean exile and networks of
activists within Chilean exile during the dictatorship, seen in texts such as: Alan
Angell & Susan Carstairs (1987) The Exile Question in Chilean Politics, Third
World Quarterly, 9(1), pp. 148 –167; Marita Eastmond (1997) The Dilemmas of
Exile: Chilean refugees in the USA (Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgen-
sis); Diana Kay (1987) Chileans in Exile: private struggles, public lives (Basingstoke:
Macmillan); Francis Peddie (2014) Young, Well-Educated and Adaptable: Chilean
exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973 – 2010 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press); Thomas Wright & Rody Oñate (1998) Flight from Chile (Albuquerque: Uni-
versity of New Mexico Press). And texts where gendered dynamics in Chilean exile
are explored, like: Marita Eastmond (1996) Reconstructing Life: Chilean refugee
women and the dilemmas of exile, in Gina Guijs (Ed.) Migrant Women: crossing
boundaries and changing identities (Oxford: Berg), pp. 35 – 53; Shirin Hirsch
(2012) Chileans in Exile: experiences of British interaction and return, Oral
History, 40(1), pp. 47 – 56; Loreto Rebolledo (2004) El exilio como quiebre biográ-
fico, in Sonia Montecino, René Castro & Marco Antonio de la Parra (Eds)
Mujeres: espejos y fragmentos (Santiago: Catalonia); and Julie Shayne (2009) They
Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean exiles, culture and feminism (Lanham, MD: Lexing-
ton Books).
[12] Eliana Ortega & Nancy Saporta Sternbach (1986) Gracias a la Vida: recounting the
Third Latin American Feminist Meeting in Bertioga, Brazil, July 31 – August 4, 1985,
Off Our Backs, 16(1), p. 5.
[13] Elizabeth Burgos (1983) Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y ası́ me nació la conciencia
(México: Siglo XXI); Alicia Partnoy (1998) The Little School: tales of disappearance
and survival (Berkeley: Cleis Press); Lynn Stephen (1994) Hear my Testimony:
Maria Teresa Tula, human rights activist of El Salvador (Boston, MA: South End
Press); Moema Viezzer (1978) ‘Sı́ me permiten hablar’ Testimonio de Domitila una
mujer de las minas de Bolivia (México: Siglo XXI).
[14] Halbwachs’ classic La mémoire collective (published posthumously in France in
1950) has only just been translated into Spanish by the University of Zaragoza
Press in 2004. To my knowledge neither Portelli’s The Death of Luigi Trastulli and
22 H. Hiner
Other Stories nor Passerini’s Fascism in Popular Memory has been fully translated
into Spanish and made widely available in Latin America, although they were trans-
lated into English in 1991 and 1987 respectively. In my own particular case, my for-
mative university training in the USA, at both the undergraduate and master’s level,
allowed me to access these texts and incorporate them into my overall understanding
of memory studies before I entered my doctoral studies and, later, academia, in
Chile.
[15] Although this was not without its own problems as well, which I have previously
explored in Hillary Hiner (2009) Voces soterradas, violencias ignoradas: discurso,
violencia polı́tica y género en los Informes Rettig y Valech, Latin American Research
Review, 44(3), pp. 50 – 74.
[16] ‘Presentan querella por violencia sexual como tortura en dictadura,’ Radio Bı́o-Bı́o, 7
December 2010, http://www.biobiochile.cl/2010/12/07/presentan-querella-por-
violencia-sexual-como-tortura-en-dictadura.shtml, and ‘Justicia acoge querella
por violencia sexual a mujeres en dictadura,’ El Mostrador (28 May 2014), http://
www.elmostrador.cl/pais/2014/05/28/justicia-acoge-querella-por-violencia-sexual-
a-mujeres-en-dictadura/
[17] Memoria Abierta (2011) Y nadie queria saber. Relatos sobre violencia contra las
mujeres en el terrorismo de Estado en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Memoria Abierta),
p. 19.
[18] ‘La memoria llega a la diversidad sexual’, Pagina 12 (10 December 2011), http://
www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/sociedad/3-183063-2011-12-10.html
[19] Julissa Mantilla (2007) ‘Sin la verdad de las mujeres la historia no estará completa.’
Perspectiva de género en la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación del Perú, in
Anne Pérotin Dumon (Ed.) Historizar el pasado vivo en América Latina. http://
etica.uahurtado.cl/historizarelpasadovivo/es_contenido.php; Marı́a Sonderéguer
(Ed.) (2012) Género y poder. Violencias de género en contextos de represión polı́tica
y conflictos armados (Bernal: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes); ‘Eu acho, não,
tenho quase certeza que eu não fui estuprada’, El Pais (10 December 2014), http://
brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2014/12/10/politica/1418210232_634592.html
[20] Victoria Alvarez (2000) El encierro en los campos de concentración, in Fernanda Gil
Lozano, Valeria Pita & Marı́a Gabriela Ini (directoras) (Eds) Historia de las Mujeres
en la Argentina. Tomo II, Siglo XX (Buenos Aires: Taurus/Alfaguara), pp. 67 – 89;
Nubia Becker (2012) Una mujer en Villa Grimaldi (Santiago: Pehuén); Edelmira Car-
rillo, Ester Hernández & Teresa Veloso (2012) Los muros del silencio. Relatos de
mujeres, violencias, identidades y memoria (Concepción: Ediciones Escaparate);
Ingrid Faria Gianordoli-Nascimento (2012) Mulheres e militancia (Belo Horizonte:
UFMG); Paola Martı́nez (2009) Género, polı́tica y revolución en los años setenta
(Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi); Joana Pedro, Cristina Wolff & Ana Marı́a Veiga
(2011) Resistências, gênero e feminismos contra as ditaduras no Cone Sul (Florianópo-
lis: Editora Mulheres); Amelinha Teles & Rosalina Leite (2013) Da guerrilha à
impresa feminista (Sao Paulo: Edición Intermeios); Tamara Vidaurrázaga (2007)
Mujeres en rojo y negro, reconstrucción de la memoria de tres mujeres miristas (Con-
cepción: Ediciones Escaparate); Cristina Wolff (2011) Machismo e feminismo nas
trajetórias de militantes da esquerda armada no Cone Sul dos anos 1970: Um
olhar do exı́lio, in Joana Maria Pedro, Artur Cesar Isaia & Carmencita de Holleben
Mello Ditzel (Eds) (Comp.) Relações de poder e subjetividades (Ponta Grossa: Editora
Todapalavra), pp. 31 – 48.
[21] Florencia Mallon (2003) Barbudos, Warriors, and Rotos: the MIR, masculinity, and
power in the Chilean agrarian reform, 1965 – 74, in Matthew Gutmann (Ed.) Chan-
ging Men and Masculinities in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press),
pp. 179 – 215; and Lessie Jo Frazier & Deborah Cohen (2003) Defining the Space of
Mexico’s 1968: heroic masculinity in the prison and ‘women’ in the streets, Hispanic
American History Review, 83(4), pp. 617– 660.
[22] Marta Zabaleta (1986) Research on Latin American Women: in search of our politi-
cal independence, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 5(2), p. 99.
[23] Andrea Andújar (2009) El amor en tiempos de revolución: los vı́nculos de pareja de
la militancia de los 70. Batallas, telenovelas y rock and roll, in Andrea Andújar,
Débora D’Antonio, Fernanda Gil Lozano, Karin Grammático & Marı́a Laura Rosa
(Eds) De minifaldas, militancias y revoluciones (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxem-
burg), pp. 149 –170.
[24] ‘I want to be an orphan’ (Voglio essere orfano in Italian) was a commonly seen slogan
in 1968 student protests in Italy and signified a radical break with past social move-
ments, figures of authority, and traditional familial relations.

[25] Hugo Vezzetti (2009) Argentina: the signs and images of ‘revolutionary war’, in
Philipp Gassert & Martin Klimke 1968: memories and legacies of a global revolt
(Washington, DC: German Historical Institute), pp. 27 – 31, p. 27.
[26] As already mentioned, this bibliography is almost purely based on national studies
of 1968 and student movements in individual countries, the majority with only brief
or passing mentions of May 1968 in France; see Eugenia Allier (2009) Presentes-
pasados del 68 mexicano. Una historización de las memorias públicas del movi-
miento estudiantil, 1968 – 2007, Revista mexicana de sociologı́a, 71(2), pp. 287 –
317; Nicolás Casullo (1998) Parı́s 68. Las escrituras, el recuerdo y el olvido (Buenos
Aires: Manantial); Marialice Foracchi (1977) O estudante e a transformaçao da soci-
dade brasileira (Sao Paulo: Editora Nacional); Elizabeth Jelin & Diego Sempol (Eds)
(2006) El pasado en el futuro: los movimientos juveniles (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI);
Victoria Langland (2013) Speaking of Flowers: student movements and the making
and remembering of 1968 in military Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press);
Ana Longoni & Mariano Mestman (2008) Del Di Tella a ‘Tucumán Arde’. Vanguardia
artı́stica y polı́tica en el ‘68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba); Valeria Manzano
(2014) The Age of Youth in Argentina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press); Vania Markarian (2001) Treinta años de debates públicos sobre el movi-
miento estudiantil mexicano de 1968, Anuario de Espacios Urbanos, pp. 239– 264;
Jean Meyer ([1969] 2008) El movimiento estudiantil en América Latina, Sociológica,
23(68), pp. 179– 195, Beatriz Sarlo (2005) Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y
giro subjetivo (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI); Julio Scherer Garcı́a & Carlos Monsiváis
(1999) Parte de guerra. Tlatelolco 1968 (México: Aguilar); Hugo Vezzetti (2002)
Pasado y presente (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI).
[27] Within this body of work there have been more transnational analyses, particularly
within the discipline of Political Science; see Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen &
Manuel Antonio Garretón (Eds) (1992) Fear at the Edge: state terror and resistance in
Latin America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press); John Dinges (2004) The
Condor Years: how Pinochet and his allies brought terrorism to three continents
(New York: The New Press); Daniel Feierstein (Ed.) (2009) Terrorismo de Estado y
genocidio en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Prometeo); Greg Grandin (2007)
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the rise of the new imperi-
alism (New York: Holt Paperbacks); Peter Kornbluh ([2003] 2013) The Pinochet File
(Washington, DC: National Security Archive); Juan J. Linz & Alfred Stepan (1990)
Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South
America, and post-communist Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press);
Aldo Marchesi, Federico Lorenz, Peter Winn & Steve J. Stern (2014) No hay
mañana sin ayer (Santiago: LOM); Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter &
Laurence Whitehead (Eds) (1986) Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: prospects
for democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); Laurence Whitehead
24 H. Hiner
(Ed.) (1996) The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the

Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
[28] See several entries in the previous footnote and also: Sophie Baby, Olivier Compag-
non & Eduardo González (Eds) (2009) Violencia y transiciones polı́ticas a finales del
Siglo XX. Europa del Sur-América Latina (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez); Alexandra
Barahona De Brito, Carmen Gonzalez Enriquez & Paloma Aguilar (Eds) (2001)
The Politics of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Omar Sanchez (2003)
Beyond Pacted Transitions in Spain and Chile: elite and institutional differences,
Democratization, 10(2), pp. 65 – 86.
[29] To my knowledge, comparative pieces on Chile and Italy during the 1960s and 1970s
are relatively uncommon, although these texts do exist; see Raffaele Nocera (2009)
Italia y América Latina, una relación de bajo perfil, 1945 – 1965. El caso de Chile, in
Fernando Purcell & Alfredo Riquelme (Eds) Ampliando miradas. Chile y su historia
en un tiempo global (Santiago: RIL/Instituto de Historia PUC), pp. 261 – 304; Ales-
sandro Santoni (2011) El comunismo italiano y la vı́a chilena (Santiago: RIL/
USACH); Marı́a Rosario Stabili & Luigi Guarnieri (2004) Il mito politico dell’
America Latina negli anni sessanta e settanta, in Agostino Giovagnoli & Giorgio
Del Zanna (Eds) Il mondo visto dall’Italia (Milan: Guerini e Associati), pp. 228– 241.
[30] Paul Ginsborg (1990) A History of Contemporary Italy (London: Penguin), p. 302.
[31] Paola Bono & Sandra Kemp (Eds) (1991) Italian Feminist Thought: a reader (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell); Maude Ann Bracke (2014) Women and the Reinvention of the Pol-
itical: feminism in Italy, 1968 – 1983 (New York: Routledge); Luisa Passerini (1991)
Storie di donne e femministe (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier); The Milan Women’s Book-
store Collective (1990) Sexual Difference: a theory of social-symbolic practice (Bloo-
mington: Indiana University Press).
[32] Very little has been explored concerning one interesting transnational Chile – Italy
aspect: those Chileans that were exiled in Italy during the dictatorship. Less is
known about those women that were exiled and their contacts with Italian feminism.
One of the only texts on Chilean exile itself is Loreto Rebolledo (2004) El exilio
como quiebre biográfico, in Sonia Montecino, René Castro & Marco Antonio de
la Parra (Eds) Mujeres: espejos y fragmentos (Santiago: Catalonia).
[33] Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the Political, p. 3.
[34] Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation, p. 111.
[35] K. Lynn Stoner (2003) Militant Heroines and the Consecration of the Patriarchal
State: the glorification of loyalty, combat, and national suicide in the making of
Cuban national identity, Cuban Studies, 34, p. 91.
[36] Cherie Zalaquett (2009) Chilenas en armas. Testimonios e historia de mujeres mili-
tares y guerrilleras subversivas (Santiago: Catalonia).
[37] Ximena Goecke (2005) Juventud y polı́tica revolucionara en Chile en los sesenta,
p. 26. http://www.archivochile.com/tesis/04_tp/04tp0002.pdf
[38] Chacaltana, Oral Archive Collection of Villa Grimaldi. DVD 147, Disc 1, Santiago, 2
November 2011 [consulted 4 June 2014]. Words in cursive were emphasized in the
original audio.
[39] Lily Rivas, personal interview with author, Lily’s home, Concepción, Chile, 19 July
2014.
[41] Tamara Vidaurrázaga also confronts this myth in her own work—Mujeres en rojo y
negro, reconstrucción de la memoria de tres mujeres miristas.
[42] Lily Rivas, personal interview with author, Lily’s home, Concepción, Chile, 19 July
2014.
[43] Edgardo Enrı́quez, Miguel Enrı́quez’s father (Miguel was one of the founders of the
MIR, as has already been mentioned), was a medical doctor and dean of the
University of Concepción from 1969 to 1972. He was also Allende’s Minister of Edu-
cation in the short two-month span leading up to the coup.
[44] Edelmira Carrillo, personal interview with author, Edelmira’s home, Concepción,
Chile, 18 July 2014.
[45] Alejandra Matus, ‘Los imperdonables,’ http://archive.today/CSIU
[46] Carmen Castillo (1994) La flaca Alejandra. (documentary film).
[47] Luz Arce (2004) Inferno: a story of terror and survival in Chile (Madison, WI: Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press).
[48] http://www.lashistoriasquepodemoscontar.cl/chanfreau.htm
[49] Luisa Passerini (2007) Memory and Utopia (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing), p. 28.
[50] Becker, Oral Archive Collection of Villa Grimaldi. DVD 12, Disc 2, Santiago, 9 Sep-
tember 2009.
[52] Ester Hernández, personal interview with author, Ester’s house, Concepción, Chile,
20 July 2014.
[53] Ximena Jiles (1992) De la miel a los implantes: historia de las Polı́ticas de Regulación
de la Fecundidad en Chile (Santiago: CORSAPS); Heidi Tinsman (2002) Partners in
Conflict: the politics of gender, sexuality, and labor in the Chilean agrarian reform,
1950 – 1973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). As Tinsman points out, the
maintenance of this traditional family order once birth control was introduced
was not always possible and could be contested by women, particularly young
women who sought to rebel against prevailing gender norms.
[54] Marta Zabaleta, an Argentinean woman who participated in the MIR and the Frente
de Mujeres Revolucionarias, remembers that the Frente did not have more than thir-
teen women in total and that of the three founding members, two were Argentinean
and one French in origin. In one meeting, when speaking of women’s rights,
someone yelled at her, ‘Why is she speaking if she’s Argentinean? She is just here
to put strange ideas in our women’s heads!’; in Victoria Aldunate (2010) Historia
Feminista Latinoamericana: Marta Zabaleta, sobreviviente de dictaduras, http://
feministautonoma.blogspot.com/2010/09/historia-feminista-latinoamericana.html
[55] This bibliography is extremely vast and not related in a direct fashion to this article;
however, for a general idea, see Edda Gaviola Artigas, Ximena Jiles M., Lorella
Lopestri M. & Claudia Rojas M. (1986) Queremos votar en las próximas elecciones:
historia del movimiento femenino chileno 1913 – 1952 (Santiago: Centro de Análisis
y Difusión de la Condición de la Mujer); Lorena Godoy, Elizabeth Hutchison,
Karin Rosemblatt & Ma. Soledad Zárate (Eds) (1995) Disciplina y Desacato: Con-
strucción de identidad en Chile. Siglos XIX y XX (Santiago: Ediciones SUR/
CEDEM); Elizabeth Hutchinson (2006) Labores propias de su sexo. Género, polı́ticas
y trabajo en Chile urbano 1900 – 1930 (Santiago: LOM, originally published in
English by Duke University Press in 2001); Marı́a Angélica Illanes (2006) Cuerpo y
sangre de la polı́tica. La construcción de las visitadoras sociales en Chile, 1887 – 1940
(Santiago: LOM); Julieta Kirkwood (1986) Ser Polı́tica en Chile: los Nudos de la Sabi-
durı́a Feminista (Santiago: Flacso); Karin Rosemblatt (2000) Gendered Compromises:
political cultures and the State in Chile, 1920 – 1950 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press).
[56] As Julie Shayne states: ‘For the most part Allende’s programs offered state support
for the traditional feminine roles of mother and wife with the goal of enabling
their insertion into the labor market. From a socialist perspective, if class hierarchies
are flattened, then all laborers will be on equal footing—women included . . . The
end result was that Allende’s revolutionary program was partially communicated
through expanded ideas of maternity and matrimony,’ Julie Shayne (2004) The Revo-
lution Question: feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press). See also: Francesca Miller (1991) Latin American
26 H. Hiner
Women and the Search for Social Justice (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England); Mallon, ‘Barbudos, Warriors, and Rotos’; Thomas, Contesting Legitimacy
in Chile.
[57] Margaret Keck & Kathryn Sikkink (1998) Activists Beyond Borders: advocacy networks
in international politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
[59] Ester Hernández, personal interview with author, Ester’s house, Concepción, Chile,
20 July 2014.
[60] I do not have the space here to explore the full ramifications and political impli-
cations of these cases, which are many and quite complex. For more information,
see Nelly Richard (1998) Polı́ticas de la memoria y técnicas del olvido, in Residuos y
Metáforas (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio), pp. 25– 73, and Michael Lazzara
(2011) Luz Arce and Pinochet’s Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
[61] Steve Stern (2006) Battling for Hearts and Minds (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press).
[62] ‘The memories of feminists are a fascinating genre and an important tool only if we
succeed in creating a context where they can be fully used. Since tradition cannot
simply mean one-way communication—whether in the field of teaching or in poli-
tics—an urgent task is the creation of a context generated by and generating in its
turn two-way communication, where the first to speak is not the older woman,’
Luisa Passerini (2007) ‘Becoming a Subject in the Time of the Death of the
Subject,’ Memory and Utopia (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing), pp. 33– 53, p. 51.
[63] Marı́a Fernanda Barrera, personal interview with author, Mafe’s house, Concepción,
Chile, 17 July 2014.

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