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Postscript
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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P O S T S C R I P T Democracy came and, hot on its heels, arrived the glorious and majestic st century.We had waited for both with illusions, fears, ideas,and dragons.The world did not end and the earth still rotates around the sun. I like that.We have new opportunities to shine bright on this planet. The world that we inherited from the dictatorship has not yet died a certain death. I do not like that.The mark it left is a tattoo on the national soul; it makes me cry when I see its image, when I watch how we built an intangible country,when I listen to words in the wind, when I meet people with whom I shared the hard years, and when we remember who we were back then. Malucha Pinto Solari,actor and writer, M C, pobladora organizer from La Victoria, remembered her invitation to Santiago’s National Stadium to celebrate the return of democracy and to listen to PatricioAylwin a few months after he was elected president of Chile in December . She recalled how she put on her best clothes to go to the stadium.This had also been the place where “her Nestor had been, . . . where they had left him injured,” injured to the point of no return .The National Stadium, used as a concentration camp by the dictatorship, was not a place she had ever visited after her experience of violence and loss. Once inside—invited to greet the returning democracy alongside artists, renowned politicians, and fellow Chileans—she could not help but look around and imagine where Nestor might have been. She pictured him,where he might|| || have sat, somewhere in the rows, locked up. She felt the weight of their recent history. Her stomach turned when she heardAylwin’s calm voice, which stood in stark contrast to the terror of her own memories. When Aylwin began to speak of the military in his address, people in the stadium booed. Their jeering drowned Aylwin’s words in sounds of protest, until he used his authority to silence them and insisted that he would be the president of all Chileans.Margarita Calderón felt that,although the leaders of this new democracy had invited her to participate in its unfolding, in reality, they never did.₁ The importance of the memory of the recent past for creating a democracy in the present has formed an important part of a nascent scholarship on Chilean history.² Political leaders and activists within civil society have addressed questions of memory as they negotiated contemporary change and the future of democracy. But just as redemocratization has not yet included all Chileans as citizens with equal rights, not all Chileans share equal access to interpretive power.The memories of some are privileged over those of others. Margarita Calderón’s reflections reveal that some Chileans carry the burden of the violence they experienced in the past. Other Chilean women have claimed that their memories, especially those that include the gendered aspects of human rights violations, including sexual violence and torture and the denial of women’s reproductive rights, have not yet been given the attention they deserve.The histories and memories of women’s struggles, thus, have to become part of the construction of a collective memory in contemporary Chile.³ New understandings of women’s rights in Chile have developed in the midst of a long historical process of national and transnational negotiations involving motherhood, sexuality, political competitions, and terror. Feminist mobilization and women’s access to citizenship rights were neither the inevitable outcome of economic modernization and political democracy nor the consequence of a linear progression that gradually improved the state of gender equity in the nation. Instead, they resulted from negotiations, still ongoing , that were shaped by both improvements and setbacks in the recognition of women as full and equal citizens.The struggles for rights by diverse groups of women have offered important clues to the variety of achievements or successes women could claim. Middle-class feminists and professional women often found it easier than poor women did to work with state institutions like SERNAM to assure that their concerns were addressed.And yet the poor, the pobladoras, articulated their own concerns about rights violations in Postscript|| || [18.189.180.244] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:41 GMT) their own context of class- and gender-based oppression and, as a result, developed different strategies for change. Even if...