Art Against Dictatorship: Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet

4. Arpillera Making in Other Groups and Its Spread

THE EMERGENCE OF ARPILLERA MAKING AMONG THE RELATIVES OF DISAPPEARED PERSONS The relatives of the disappeared who made arpilleras were the mothers, wives, partners, sisters, and daughters of people who had been taken away by the secret police and never seen alive by their families again; nor were their whereabouts known. In total there were 1,163 disappeared.1 Most were working class2 and leftists from the Socialist and Communist Parties and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria; MIR). Their relatives met each other while searching for them in prisons, morgues, government offices, and the courts, and while seeking legal assistance at the Comité.3 A small number of these relatives formed an arpillera group that met regularly in the Comité offices in eastern Santiago. I call them the “Agrupación arpilleristas ,” since they were a subset of the group of relatives that soon formed the Association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared, or Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (AFFD) in Spanish. As with the unemployed women, there are contradictory accounts about how the Agrupación arpilleristas began making arpilleras. One set of accounts, by the earliest members of the group, describes the initiative as coming from the women themselves.The other,put forward by Comité staff members Hilaria and Anabella, and with which one of the first Agrupación arpilleristas agrees, affirms that arpillera making began at the Comité’s instigation.4 According to the first set of accounts, the women began making arpilleras without prompting in the eastern zone Comité office.5 They were looking for a way to earn money, derive therapeutic benefit, express themselves, or denounce the regime and its practices, their emphasis varying from person to person. 4 Arpillera Making in Other Groups and Its Spread 75 Arpillera Making in Other Groups and Its Spread For those who badly needed an income, the money was a primary motivation, whereas for those who were more comfortably off, solace and self-expression were more important. Fabiola, a group member and mother of a disappeared woman, for example, said that the Agrupación arpillera group started because the relatives needed a way to vent their feelings, and because Julieta Neri, the middle-class mother of a disappeared man, who possessed knowledge about different kinds of Chilean folk art, suggested that they vent their feelings by expressing themselves in cloth and formed a group for this purpose. The group members knew about arpilleras made in rural areas of Chile and modeled their work loosely on these. About a year later, drama students came to help them depict movement in their work. Fabiola said: And as I say, with this searching, when we realized that the days, weeks, and months were slipping by, there came a moment—I don’t really know how the idea came about—but there came a moment when it was necessary to find a sort of escape valve, a way of somehow expressing your sorrow or your pain, or that we receive Arpillera by a member of the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (Association of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared), depicting her search for her disappeared relative in government offices and her constant wondering where he or she is; late 1970s or early 1980s. Photograph by Jacqueline Adams of an arpillera in the collection of André Jacques and Geneviève Camus. 76 Art Against Dictatorship some sort of therapy basically, which would do us good, because at that time you didn’t know what to think or do. As we went every day—we were going around doing this [searching in detention centers and going to theVicaría area offices] every day of the week. [. . .] The relatives who lived in Ñuñoa would meet in the Vicaría of Ñuñoa [in eastern Santiago], those who lived in the center met in a Vicaría office designated for them in the center, those in the south met in the south, and so on. The groups [of relatives] formed. I in fact didn’t belong to the eastern zone, and they invited me to one of these meetings where they were starting to create what was in fact called an arpillera workshop, asking what we thought about the idea— but in fact we didn’t have anything like a teacher to guide us or anything—“What did we think, for example, if somehow we...