The happy historian (Part 2): Degrees of history

Posted on January 4, 2013 by zach

A happy Zach McKiernan with the Human Rights Committee from Nido 20.

I recently watched a documentary on, of all things, happiness. The film, “Happy,” focused on the study of happiness (positive psychology) and what makes people happy and when, along with the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that contribute or detract from happiness. One assertion is that being connected to a community or collective, being engaged in social interaction, with something to give and care about makes people happy. The documentary’s happy doctors (Ph.Ds. in psychology) demonstrate that social bonding inhibits self-interest and cooperation (and even competition) induces the better-than-drugs release of dopamine—a natural agent that makes us all smile with weak knees and big hearts.

I suspect that the readers of these words have also questioned happiness or being happy–specifically, being happy with the solitary process that constitutes the core of historians’ identity. Continue reading →

Letters from Chile: A photo gallery

Gallery

Posted on July 6, 2012 by zach

This gallery contains 37 photos.

In addition to the photos that have accompanied Zach McKiernan’s “Letters from Chile” series this spring, there have been many more that we didn’t post with the articles, but which we’re including here in a visual addendum to the series. … Continue reading →

Letters from Chile: A dead dictator’s homage, a public history movement (Part 2)

Posted on June 27, 2012 by zach

/continued from Part I

At the outset of this series, I proposed two seemingly simple questions in hopes of unpacking the complexity of sites of memory and how they “engage citizens in human rights issues” vis-à-vis the past. What type of historic work is taking place? And who is doing that work? A look at these Letters offers suggestions to answer these questions but also gives shape to other critical inquiries.

A human rights workshop with university students at Jose Domingo Canas (Photo: Yenny Aros)

What and where is the line between personal activism and professional responsibility in the struggle for human rights? How do we valorize and make visible and then useful historic sites connected to violence and terror? Why and when do public memorials—often associated with “soft culture”—move into more politically engaged and activist oriented sites of memory? Is memory a right, as some suggest? Following these threads in both a reflective and recursive way has led me to the empirical evidences as much as the intellectual exercises that shape and constantly reshape my understanding of the connection between public history and human rights—and will be covered fully in the dissertation. In short, as I rode my red bike around Santiago, I began to build practical and theoretical bridges connecting the two, seeing the relationship between the practice of (public) history and popular expressions and expectations of human rights. Continue reading →

Letters from Chile: A dead dictator’s homage, a public history movement (Part 1)

Posted on June 25, 2012 by zach

Water cannon used by the state at the June 10 funa (Photo: Zachary McKiernan)

This past Sunday, June 10, the right-wing Corporation 11 de Septiembre held an homage to the dead dictator Augusto Pinochet under the auspices of a documentary screening at the iconic Teatro Caupolican in Santiago Centro. That day it was answered and challenged in sometimes violent ways by diverse sectors of society and weeks before when many of Santiago’s notably non-violent human rights organizations and sites of memory maneuvered to use legal and political recourse to prevent a ceremony that celebrated a leader infamous for overseeing an era of human rights violations. After these efforts were exhausted and the Chilean Courts came back with an answer that allowed the planned activity to take place, it became apparent that the battle for history and memory would manifest that day in the streets and sidewalks around Teatro Caupolican. Continue reading →

National Stadium, National Memory: A Personal Letter

Posted on June 6, 2012 by zach

Incomplete and semi-permanent interventions in Escotilla 8, a “special protection” site within the Chilean National Stadium

This is a personal letter. It is personal because I came to Chile to write and participate in the history of the museum project “National Stadium, National Memory,” whose aim is “the material establishment of national memory in respect… to the Concentration Camp… in 1973.” Where I ended up some seven months later in the network and politics of human rights and public memorials is a story that will unfold in the dissertation, tentatively titled Public History and Human Rights: The National Stadium of Chile and the Power of Public Memorials. But that’s for next year. This year, though, has been a real life lesson in preparation for a career in public history. That this lesson is intimately linked to human rights through historically oriented projects makes it equally empowering and problematic—and a reminder of a question my venerable advisor Randy Bergstrom constantly asks me: what and where is the line between personal activism and professional responsibility? Navigating this and other ethical challenges has been at the center of my study and approach to an engaged scholarship of advocacy.

Continue reading →

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights: Making Consensus Matter?

Posted on May 23, 2012 by zach

Since my September arrival in Chile, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights has become a common ground for my historical work, with handfuls of visits to its Center of Documentation for conversations and conferences, and the permanent exhibit. Although not a physical or recovered site connected to human rights violations, it sits squarely in the memory landscape of Chile, a barely-born institution that has made waves since its 2010 inauguration under then-President Michele Bachalet. The museum’s history has roots reaching back to the Rettig Commission’s recommendations (1991). Its creation weaves through the demands of human rights organizations and their UNESCO designated “Memory of the World” archives, and the commitment of two consecutive presidents of Chile’s Concertación, the center-left political bloc whose reputation for handling human rights reparations in the post-dictatorship period (1990-2010) is still questioned and critiqued. The museum’s executive director Ricardo Brodsky told me in an April 2012 interview that the museum represents a collaborative effort between diverse sectors of civil society and the state.

Continue reading →

History on a Shoestring at Nido 20: A Memory Site in its Infancy

Posted on April 16, 2012 by zach

The exterior of Nido 20

In Chile between 1973 and 1990, according to the 2004 National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (The Valech Report), 1,132 sites were utilized as centers of detention, torture, and extermination. They ranged from hospitals and soccer stadiums to police precincts and private houses. More than 250 operated in Santiago alone during Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. One of these centers was known as Nido 20, a non-descript home located at Santa Teresa 037 in the neighborhood of La Cisterna, less than a block from the Gran Avenida. These numbers and places paint for us a horrific map of a paralyzed society, a representation of the wide-reaching repression achieved by a policy of state terror. From the arid north through (sub)urban Santiago to the Patagonian south, in Pinochet’s infamous words “not a single leaf moves without me knowing.”

Linking Pinochet to the leaves of Nido 20 isn’t an easy exercise though. The Human Rights Committee of La Cisterna now in charge of the home have difficult and still-silenced histories to interpret at the site that functioned clandestinely and “normally” in the neighborhood in 1975. Moreover, those who “worked” in the home in that year, a short-lived yet lethal mix of state intelligence services and “civilians affiliated with nationalist and extreme rightist groups” (Valech, 461) known as Comando Conjunto, have been equally elusive in the historic record. But the 2005 “protection of Nido 20 demonstrates that the most ‘invisible’ places are as important to conserve as the most ‘emblematic’ of places” (Patio 29: Tras la Cruz de Fierro, 2009, 28). Or in other words, perhaps, Nido 20’s invisibility is emblematic of Pinochet’s wide-reaching human rights violations and, moreover, of today’s movement to make the knowledge of that visible and useful in the historic present.

Getting a grip on the knowledge of Nido 20 through its House Museum of Human Rights: Alberto Bachelet Martinez, though, has perplexed me. For starters, Auturo Bachelet, the faithful general who died imprisoned under the Pinochet regime and father of former president Michelle Bachelet, who herself was imprisoned with her mother in Villa Grimaldi, never passed through Nido 20. The naming of the House Museum after General Bachelet was perhaps a political ploy and strategic nod by neighborhood activists, given that the Bachelet family is from La Cisterna.

Moreover, after a handful of visits to the humble yet humming community and revealing conversations with the three-person neighborhood human rights committee active at the house, I always walked away with more questions than answers. The historic interventions and interpretations are generally ambiguous and incomplete. Seven dominating posters are donations from Villa Grimaldi and tell, well, mostly the story of Villa Grimaldi. There are no informative brochures or books for sale or even a website to consult. Only recently did the house receive Internet access and, equally important, two university students from Universidad de Santiago de Chile’s Department of History practicing their “practica.” Nido 20 is in no uncertain terms humbled by a severe lack of human and financial resources, struggling just to meet the approximately $120 monthly bill for water, electricity, and gas, to say nothing of the historic memory work that stands ahead. It is a site of memory in its infancy. So when the committee asked me to help with historic research, I couldn’t say no.

Community center at the rear of Nido 20

What was easy and exciting to get a grip on was Nido 20’s physical and political place in La Cisterna, to “always be connected directly to the community’s base,” according to committee member Fidel, “the unions, the students and teachers, the common people.” The importance of this cannot be understated given the current concerns and present reality of rights in Chile: access to education, economic and labor opportunities, and gender equality, to name a few. At the back of Nido 20, then, sits a large center where workshops in computing, cooking, and sewing are held. It is also utilized as a space of encounter for La Cisterna’s organizations that lack such a space. This dual function of Nido 20 makes it both a memory site and a community center focusing on present needs and realities.

One of the goals of the committee is that workshop attendees will come to Nido 20 for practical reasons and leave with a greater and more contextualized idea of human rights through the house’s history. In a conversation I had with the son of a man who lost his life in Nido 20, doubts loomed about whether this is actually beginning to happen. Though he noted Nido 20’s geographical location as an important “reference for memory in the southern zone” of Santiago and its potential as a powerful community center, he advocated for an injection of professional collaboration at the memory site. As grassroots Nido 20 grows to gain more traction in a new genre of public memorials in Chile (note: this new genre, which I am exploring in my dissertation, is speculative in many ways and not fully developed), it’ll be necessary to have a better grip on the historic as well as administrative challenges of a House Museum of Human Rights.

Historic sites, no matter how seemingly small, open up space to make histories visible and valuable. So, too, does the opening of this space create and contribute to the politics of the present. At Santa Teresa 037 this much is apparent. What is less apparent is how the histories and history’s silences in La Cisterna will reveal themselves in a political moment of shoestring budgets and increasing community needs. But the search is on at Nido 20, the activists are in motion. Common people are at work, assessors are on the ground, national and international attention is growing. I, too, have cast my lot in with the activists. The wheels of history are turning. Because if we take the time make visible the invisible, Nido 20 in the horrific map of 1,132 sites becomes terribly important.

~ Zachary McKiernan

Previous posts in the Letters from Chile series:

Memorial Paine’s Everyday Lives: Local Stories with Universal Lessons

Posted on April 5, 2012 by zach

Raúl Lazo liked to ride horses. Luis Gaete worked with his hands in the fields. Juan Leiva believed rural education was a right. José Castro had a red tractor. Juan Leonardo, president of the Association of the Relatives of the Disappeared and Executed Detainees of Paine (AFDD-Paine), explained on a sunny countryside morning that this was a principal point of Memorial Paine: to (re)humanize those community members who fell victim to Pinochet’s repression in the rural region for which the memorial is named. Reinaldo went on to say that family members’ participation was imperative to the memorial-making process, not only to establish a narrative that rescued the daily, lived experiences in rural Paine but to also create a culture of and respect for human rights through intergenerational and community dialogue. Thus, Memorial Paine now operates as a public space for reflection as much as a center for cultural and social activities aimed at life and human rights.

When the world trained its eyes on Chile in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 military coup, the focus was on the epicenter: Santiago. But when Hunter Hawk jets and an array of army tanks were bombing the presidential palace La Moneda, so too were Chile’s less celebrated regions resisting and eventually falling to the new military order. In Paine, a small farming community about 20 miles south of Santiago, seventy people were killed and/or disappeared in October 1973, making it, according to Chile’s first truth commission, the area with the highest percentage of victims in relation to its population. In other words, “the entire community had been destroyed by terror and fear” (Paine: Un Lugar para la Memoria, AFDD brochure).

Terror and fear have been replaced with the “Memory of Life” at Memorial Paine. The memorial, initiated in 2000 and inaugurated in 2006, is uniquely local while its message undeniably universal. Situated on a small parcel surrounded by agricultural lands, the memorial’s aesthetic deliberately engages the rural environment and lifestyle. Approximately 1,000 erected wooden posts spaced a few meters apart, a forest of sorts, follow the contours of the Andean cordillera, the coastal mountain range, and the verdant valley between them. Of these, 70 posts are “missing” to represent the executed and disappeared. A small stream runs alongside the parceled property.

Most striking, though, are the seventy mosaics that fill the forest’s gaps: the epicenters, if you will, of the memorial, showing the daily life and likes of Paine’s persecuted before the persecution began. Raul Lazo with his horses. Luis Gaete in his garden and fields. Juan Lieva armed with textbooks and lectures. José Casto’s red tractor. These mosaics are the work of family members and community friends, working along artists, social workers, and psychologists, that glued together the memorial’s goals: the participation of family members and the creation of, no doubt, creative dialogue and a culture of human rights for the community. The mosaics serve as markers of a past that is sometimes silent at other human rights memorials: Paine’s citizens as humans, neither victims nor martyrs. And their their construction also produced new and old narratives between neighbors.

Juan Rene, whose grandfather was disappeared in Paine on October 16, 1973, likes history. He began his participation by making a mosaic and attending the memorial’s social and cultural events. But he went beyond this in the form of his thesis “Encounter with Life and Death: History and Memories of State Terrorism and Violence in Paine (1960-2008)” at the University of Chile. Although this work isn’t displayed at Memorial Paine, it is an important piece of the puzzle. It is at the same time both a producer and product of the Memorial Paine in that it sprung from and developed alongside it. The work opens up a larger historical analysis that captures the present moment as much as the local precedents that led to the repression during and even after the dictatorship. It is a rural history that was written from a social-cultural perspective because of the memorial made some three decades after the disappearance of his grandfather. This, I think, lends legitimacy to the potential of public memorials to move beyond “soft culture” and into the sphere of both serious community activism and academic work.

Juan Rene, his uncle Juan Reinaldo (AFDD-Paine’s president), and others have achieved a unique experience in Paine: an activated memorial site outside of the traditional center of Santiago. Rescuing, retelling, and revalorizing the daily experiences—as much as the political and social paradigms—of Chile’s less celebrated rural communities is a work that uncovers silences; silences that however geographically peripheral stand central to larger lessons of resistance, repression, and respect for human rights. And if we listen to these silences, we no doubt will recognize and give life to the mosaic-shards that make up our own fragile memories.

~ Zachary McKiernan

This is Part 3 of the “Letters from Chile.” Also see the Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2.

Bougainvillea and Bitter Memories: Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace

Posted on March 30, 2012 by zach

Birch Courtyard, Villa Grimaldi

Horns honk, people push, patience is short; Santiago is teeming with activity, a modern metropolis in the throes of summer heat. But 45 minutes from the city’s center sits a quiet place of rest, respite, and reflection, filled with the pleasant sounds of birds in birch trees and the smell of roses and bougainvillea. Not only is this small oasis at the foot of the Andes a peaceful park but it is also a Site of Conscience. In fact, in the form of Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace, a grassroots initiative born in the mid-90s to recover the site and re-tell the stories of a one-time clandestine concentration camp, community activists and human rights actors have succeeded in creating a unique environment to engage a complicated past.

A model recreates Villa Grimaldi as it was from 1974-78

Since Chile’s transition to democracy in 1990 until the present day, many members of civil society have been trying to piece together a horrific history while others have pushed against these efforts. Such was the case when immediately after the dictatorship plans were discovered to erect condominiums at the site once known as “Cuartel Terranova” by a construction company with family ties to a Pinochet henchman. But alert neighbors and activists allied with timid yet committed politicians attempted to reverse the effort to erase the remnants of a camp that, between 1974 and 1978, housed 4,500 prisoners, 232 of whom were disappeared or executed. And they succeeded. But after the property was officially transferred to newly established neighborhood organizations, it was also discovered that many of Villa’s original structures had already been razed. Gone was the principal Villa. Gone was the infamous Tower. Gone were the hellish cells that housed the humans who had participated in the democratic revolution of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973.

But what confronted the protagonists was not only a mostly barren piece of land. They also faced the challenges of undertaking the very first attempt in Chile’s transition to recover a physical site connected to human rights violations, to say nothing of the fact that very little was known about Cuartel Terranova. What was apparent, though, was that former prisoners of the camp were essential to the enterprise–that it was their perspective and intimate knowledge of the place that would help shape the historical narrative and thematic nature of Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace. According to Villa’s website, in 1994 “it was decided to construct a park that would serve as a place of remembrance, reflection, and the promotion of Human Rights, emphasizing life and peace where there was once death and suffering.” Since then, though, Villa has flourished beyond this initial mission, reaching wider national and international audiences through a network of professional work and development. This work and development runs the gamut between performance and theatre on the park’s grounds to academic seminars and publications pointed at collective memory and citizenship development.

Re-creation of the infamous water tower, used for cells

Evidence of this development is also clear in Villa’s new initiative to create a museum of memory under the leadership of Carolina Aguilera to complement an existing human rights education program and bilingual park tours. Aguilera wrote that one of the reasons for the initiative is the “need to investigate what happened at the site in the context of the State terrorism brought about by the military dictatorship” (“Hacia una perspectiva de Educación en Derechos Humans a partir de la experiencia de Villa Grimaldi,” published in Ciudadanía y memorias: Desarrollo de sitios de conciencia para el aprendizaje en derechos humanos, 2011). But Aguilera also conveyed to me in a recent conversation the sensitivity required to retain the Peace Park’s original message of reparation and reflection for victims. In fact, the symbolic and practical question of Pinochet’s victims of “Dónde Están?” or “Where are they?” is the departure point of historical inquiry at Villa despite, or because of, the responsibility to move beyond a narrative of “victimization.” So as much as the park grounds elicit reflection and reparation for victims, so too do they produce a conscious decision to conduct more rigorous historical work.

In a special way, though, much of this work is dependent on the collaboration of camp survivors and their (hi)stories. Villa’s Oral History Archive is one place where such work takes place. This project utilizes testimonies and insights to help piece together the concentration camp’s history and build a public archive that is accessible to students, interested citizens, and scholars, alike. This testimony is the primary source for what we know about Villa today, since no state evidence or acknowledgement attesting to the site’s history has been discovered, while material remains remain marginal at best. Thus, these firsthand accounts fuel the historic site’s fire and create the narrative and interpretive arc across the park. Aguilera hopes that the autobiographical interviews will also “contextualize the personal experience” of the one-time prisoners.

In the gardens of Villa Grimaldi

For me, my personal experience at Villa was contextualized by an environment that mixed historical knowledge and the park’s aesthetics. The bougainvillea next to the original and ominous black, metal-gate (where a Traverso bici can be spotted) was for some the first contact with the camp, which was also known as The House of the Bougainvillea. The Rose Garden, kept intact by security agents for its sensory values, too, was symbolic in survivors’ testimonies and now stands in the same place to honor the disappeared and executed women. The Birch Courtyard is set in a grid pattern to dramatize prisoners’ one-time cells, with a single birch inset in each square to represent the solitary experience of imprisonment. The Ombu Tree is one of the few vestiges that escaped the razing. From its branches prisoners were hanged. Today it is imbued with its original Argentine meaning: The Tree of Hope.

These mediations and the use of history at Villa help get at a common question that many of us memory folk confront: how to mark or memorialize sites connected to violence and terror. The utilization of a former concentration camp as a park for peace based on survivors’ testimonies and participation, then, helped me put into sharper—or perhaps reflexive—perspective the historical question of “Dónde Están?” Because as much as we are seeking physical proof and other evidence of human rights violations to establish truth and justice, so too do we need to create spiritual spaces to articulate our present feelings and the memories that they invoke. In the words quoted by Macarena Gómez Barrais (Where Memory Dwells, 2009) from a mother of a detained-disappeared person, “My son likes it here. It’s a calm place where his spirit can rest in peace.”

~ Zachary McKiernan

This is Part 2 of the “Letters from Chile” series. Also see the Introduction and Part 1.

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