Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet

3. The First Arpillera Groups

With one exception, the first unemployed women’s arpillera groups started off as income-earning groups that specialized in arpillera making in 1975. They were based in the shantytowns of Puente Alto, Lo Hermida, Villa O’Higgins, and La Faena in the eastern zone, and one group was based in the shantytown of Huamachuco in northern Santiago. At about the same time, a mixed workshop (whose members included unemployed women and relatives of the disappeared) was starting in the southern zone, and a group of just relatives of the disappeared began meeting in the Comité’s eastern zone office; both these groups will be discussed in the next chapter. Cristina, one of the earliest arpilleristas and a member of the Villa O’Higgins workshop, said: All the women who belonged to the groups of unemployed people would meet there [in the eastern Comité office]. We were the wives of trade union leaders, unemployed women by nature because we had been unemployed for a long time. And we started to group together. So all the workshops from different parts of Lo Hermida, of Puente Alto came together. At that time we had only four workshops: Lo Hermida, Puente Alto—I’ll repeat: Lo Hermida, Puente Alto, Villa O’Higgins, which was us, and the people who were starting to get together at the Comité ProPaz , the Agrupación.We started getting together in the Vicaría in April 1975, but our bolsa de cesantes here in this neighborhood was created in 1975, at the end of 1975. So we grouped together and everything, and started to make the first arpilleras, which were a denunciation of what was happening to us, of our industries that had closed, of our husbands who were hunted down. And the wives of the detained and disappeared [worked] with these [other] themes, in the Agrupación [the Association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared]. 3 The First Arpillera Groups 55 The First Arpillera Groups Cristina did not mention the La Faena group, but a Comité staff member, Anastasia, who was from that group, stated that it was formed at the same time as Lo Hermida’s. The arpillera groups in the shantytowns of La Faena and Villa O’Higgins had started off as bolsas whose members collected and sold newspapers and bottles for recycling, and sewed. I discussed this with Anastasia of La Faena: JA: And when did you begin to make arpilleras? Anastasia: In the year 1975, 1975. JA: Ah, from the beginning. Anastasia: Yes, from the beginning. JA: And when you joined the workshop, what was it like? Anastasia: The workshop started as a bolsa de cesantes. Yes, we did different things, an olla común in the chapel of San Carlos. There we began to group together because our husbands had lost their jobs, some of them had been arrested. And we started to invent how to, how to do something to be able to subsist. JA: And what did you do, at the beginning? Anastasia: At the beginning we did sewing, like aprons, mending clothes, and later looked for something more, that would bring in more money, to be able to earn more money. Anastasia’s group switched to arpillera making because the women wanted to earn more money, and because the Comité’s support opened up this possibility. Anastasia continued: Anastasia: And the arpilleras started. JA: How did they start then? Anastasia: We started together to create, to invent a way to do work, and in some way to be able to, let’s say . . . but the work that we started doing was on sacking, on “arpillera.” And later, looking for, let’s say, later we put ourselves under the protection of the Vicaría de la Solidaridad. Thanks to contacts that other people gave us, also, because they would give us the information and we would make use of it. So we came together, the La Faena workshop with the workshop of Lo Hermida, and we were the only ones, the first workshops that started the arpilleras. Contacts and the Vicaría’s protection helped consolidate the switch to arpillera making. The arpillera group in the shantytown of Villa O’Higgins was a taller (workshop ) within a bolsa. Its members worked alongside male members collecting and selling bottles and newspapers; they simultaneously tried to raise consciousness in people, engaging in a “political struggle,” as Cristina, a member, 56...