Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet

9. The Consequences of Arpillera Making

The ARPILLERISTAS’ PersPecTive The arpilleristas saw their arpillera making as having contributed to the downfall of the dictatorship, and as having been important for their survival and social and intellectual development.From their perspective,it enabled them to inform people abroad about what was really happening in Chile, provided them with income and donations, gave them the opportunity to learn, helped them relax and forget their problems, and raised their self-esteem. Informing People Abroad The arpilleras, the women thought, were a means by which people abroad could learn about life under the dictatorship at a time when the media did not talk about what was really happening in Chile. Natalia said: Because it’s something that you had in your hands and were working on with love, and knowing that it was all going to go abroad, and they would see the reality of what was happening in Chile. Because it was like a letter, you understand, a letter. Via this letter you were telling people how we were faring here. An open letter, something which, how can I say, something very personal but which at the same time was going over there and was going to be useful because it was going to say, “This is happening in Chile,”you understand? Showing what we were experiencing. And that’s why I say it was something lovely, something very nice. Natalia’s phrases “the reality of what was happening” and “how we were faring ” suggest that she saw the arpilleras as describing a collective experience. 9 The Consequences of Arpillera Making 221 The Consequences of Arpillera Making The “usefulness” of this refers to its helpfulness in the struggle; the arpilleristas thought that foreign support in this struggle was necessary, and the first step toward acquiring it was informing. The women saw themselves as denouncing the poverty and repression, and telling people about their struggles for survival, their protests and desires. They described the contents of the arpilleras using the phrases: “denuncia de qué nos pasa” (denunciation about what is happening to us),“lo que había pasado” (what had happened), “lo que estaba pasando en la actualidad del país” (what was happening at the current time in the country), “era la actualidad que se vivía en esa época”(it was the situation that we were experiencing at that time), and “lo que queremos” (what we want). Nancy recalled: So what you would do in an arpillera was show people in other countries what was happening in Chile. Because the arpilleras reached many countries, even Japan. And in them you would show, for example, the protests, the ollas comunes, the comedores, the bakeries where they would make the bread in little cans and sell them that way in order to help people. So all this was a constant struggle. So there, in the arpilleras, you would do the protests, when the police beat people, when they were arrested—all that. The marches of the relatives of the disappeared. So you would show all that in the arpilleras. And they would go to England, where else? Japan, Spain; Sweden bought a lot; Holland. And so on. European countries that also helped organizations here in Chile a lot. The women saw themselves as communicating both their personal experiences and the wider problems of human rights violations, repression, and poverty . Babette expressed it this way: I think that the important thing was that we took the opportunity, using this medium, to tell other countries about what our lives were like, all the injustice, all the human rights violations, all the forms of violence that it was our lot to face. And also all the “participation” that we women were engaged in. Babette saw the arpilleras as communicating about the women’s lives, which were traversed by the broader problems of injustice, human rights violations, and violence. While Babette evokes abstract concepts, another woman placed more emphasis on the personal, saying that they depicted their personal experience and vision, and their emotions: “You would do it as you saw things, as you were experiencing them, as you were feeling; it was at the same time your own feelings that you were depicting.” She said they were trying to 222 Art Against Dictatorship communicate “that you were not well, and that you had to do things and you had to struggle for what you were doing, to give your children a...