Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet

6. Selling Arpilleras

A system for selling solidarity art abroad does not fall into place immediately. Initially, the art may be sold locally, at the initiative of the artists. The international selling may begin quite by chance, when a trusted person living abroad offers to try and sell; at first it will be on a small scale. First steps in Chile The selling of arpilleras began locally. Comité staff were important buyers. At first they bought as individuals, and not for the Comité. Anabella, the Comité teacher, for example, bought arpilleras from groups in the eastern zone. Similarly , Hilaria, the Comité lawyer, bought the arpilleras that made up the “Vía Crucis” mural made by the relatives of the disappeared. Celinda, one of her colleagues, said: I think we were the first, I think, the first consumers, I mean, I think all the Vicaría staff and the members of this zone—this world of solidarity, resistance, petty bourgeoisie , let’s say. Because we were the ones with the ability to, we had work and the ability to buy. We were perhaps the first who bought arpilleras in large quantities. As Celinda’s words suggest, the first buyers were people involved in resistance. The unemployed women would also sell their work to visiting foreigners who contacted them via the Comité and to people recommended to them, at whose doors they would knock. They would also ask Zoe, a Comité volunteer, to sell for them, which she did, to her university classmates. As well as selling, the unemployed women engaged in bartering with the Agrupación arpilleristas, 6 Selling Arpilleras 143 Selling Arpilleras giving them their arpilleras in exchange for shoes, uniforms, and other items they needed. Much of the women’s selling was affected by the repression. As the arpilleras contained critical commentary on the regime, the women took precautions when they went out to sell, limiting themselves to those people whose addresses they had been given. Cristina said: They [the Comité] took the first steps, in doing peñas [organizing Chilean folk music evenings] and things like that to raise money to be able to buy the materials and things, to be able to—because we were not selling our product. So we would go from door to door, and who on earth was going to buy an arpillera that was a denunciation? So you would go sort of from door to door, but doors where, doors that they had told you about. I mean, “Go there, because this, this friend, might buy them.” Later on, we started in the Vicaría; we started selling our products abroad. And at that point many people started to group together, myself and my cousin, we started off in this together. Since the women could not just knock on any door because of the danger involved in what they were doing, they relied on information from the resistance community; the giving of information about who to sell to was an example of solidarity within this community. Similarly, the women would sell to people who sought them out only if they had been recommended. JA: And what did you have to do, as the leader of selling; what was your role? Cristina: My role was to check, to do the quality control. It was to sell people arpilleras, I mean, to make it possible for someone to come. All this was clandestine, so it had to be people who were recommended, in terms of buying arpilleras; it was not just anyone who could go and buy arpilleras. Now it’s very free, now they are sold all over the place, anything is, but in those days no, we were very, very careful. Because of the repression, then, the women sold their work with caution, in a clandestine fashion. They risked arrest. Zara, an Agrupación arpillerista, sold arpilleras at the Vicaría’s eastern office to a foreigner who was then caught with her packet of arpilleras. The Vicaría decided to apply for the enforcement of constitutional rights (recurso de amparo) for Zara in case she was arrested. Some time later, an article appeared in a newspaper, saying that the arpilleras were “a defamation.” Zara explained: 144 Art Against Dictatorship I was selling arpilleras in the eastern zone and the gringos would come there,because they knew more about the first workshop that had been created. They would come to the eastern zone...