Agosin and the Arpilleras How Did Folk Art Figure Politically in Chile?
On September xi, 1973, a group of Chilean military officers led by General Augusto Pinochet struck down Salvador Allende's democratically elected government. Seventeen years of oppressive dictatorship followed in Chile.
The Pinochet dictatorship routinely violated human rights. Among other abuses, thousands of Chileans were detained, tortured, killed, or "disappeared"—forcibly abducted or taken for questioning, never to return. More than iii,000 people vanished. Thousands more were rounded upward and held as political prisoners or executed at the National Stadium, a big sports complex in the city of Santiago. Pinochet's regime targeted these Chileans in an effort to suppress political opposition and dissent.
In response, a grassroots movement emerged among Chilean women. The majority of people taken in for questioning or removed from their communities were men, and immediately many women who loved them began searching for them—a dangerous, fifty-fifty revolutionary human action. Through these searches, the women began to join together, creating a customs and sharing resources.
This arpillera was created past Violeta Morales. The faceless figures next to the women correspond the missing victims who dared to oppose Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, from 1973 to 1990. Encounter full-sized image for analysis.
The Roman Catholic Church, nether the leadership of Primal Raúl Silva Henríquez, formed customs centers to support families of the disappeared. The women who came to these centers participated in workshops, taught one another applied skills, and began to brand handicrafts. Turning to the folk fine art of embroidery, they found a style to use the workshops for more just a source of income and support; these became places to gather and heal and talk well-nigh their loved ones who had been disappeared, and they also became places for the women to discover their voices. In brilliant tapestries, called arpilleras, the women began to run up together the stories of the disappeared and of other victims of the military dictatorship.
Violeta Morales was i of the women who began creating arpilleras after her brother, Newton, was taken past Pinochet's clandestine police, unremarkably called the DINA. After some members of a political group (known as MIR) took up arms confronting the new dictatorship, the DINA hunted down anyone associated with the group, whether they participated in the armed resistance or non. Newton did non participate in the resistance, but he was a member of MIR. Violeta Morales writes,
When Newton came home [on August xiii, 1974,] the men took him past the arms and he called out to my mother who was in the kitchen. "Mother, the DINA is taking me away." My female parent didn't understand what was happening at the time because she had never been political. The men tried to assure her considering she was grasping my blood brother. One of the agents took her aside and said, "Don't worry ma'am; we'll bring him back in ten minutes—we only want to speak with him. We're friends from piece of work." My brother looked stake and didn't say anything, probably so as not to frighten our mother. . . . When they took my blood brother Newton away from home, my other brother was arriving and followed the wagon in his taxi. From a altitude he saw them bring Newton shut to the church of San Francisco . . .
Afterwards our brother's disappearance, nosotros began looking for him everywhere—similar all the relatives of the detained. The DINA, Directorate of National Intelligence, was created in July 1974, and the war machine connected refining its methods and applying them more than cruelly. We began doing things immediately and found out that at the Pro-Paz Committee, which was located on Santa Monica Street, they were getting all types of reports about abuses and violations of human rights. Nosotros began looking for our blood brother in jails, cemeteries, morgues, commissaries, and anywhere a military regiment existed. Nosotros also went to the police force courts, and at many of the places we went, they received us with machine guns but for asking questions and for going effectually searching for the detained-disappeared. We sent thousands of messages away asking for help as well. Nosotros even went so far as sending letters to the leaders of the dictatorship themselves, merely nothing came of all this. . . .
From the despair emerged the idea of making arpilleras. . . . We didn't want to brand something that would role as a decoration. We wanted to design a handmade product that would denounce what we and our land were living. We wanted to tell people about our personal experiences through pieces of our own clothing. We wanted to embroider our story, the harsh and sad story of our ruined land. At first, we had problems getting the materials, peculiarly the cloth and the wool. So, we got the idea of cutting up our own clothes and unraveling our sweaters to make the starting time arpilleras.
We opened our workshop in 1974, but we didn't become public until 1975. In those years, I took total responsibility for the search of my blood brother. My sister had been kidnapped past a cab driver who interrogated her about the names of people she knew. She told him about her years as a volunteer worker in rural organizations and about all her activities every bit a academy educatee [then she was released]. Subsequently that, my sister was afraid to exit into the street to expect for our brother. I was scared as well. We were all agape to proceed on asking and searching. So I put all my free energy into the arpillera workshop; information technology was sometimes the just thing that kept me balanced emotionally. There I found other people who were suffering from the same matter and trying to assistance them sometimes helped me with my own tragedy. . . .
In the same arpillera workshops, we started training sessions to teach the women about solidarity and their role in the soup kitchens and other grouping activities. Sometimes it was hard educational activity the women in the townships because they treated us worse than lepers; they believed that our protest activities would put them in jail or amongst the disappeared. It was hard convincing them that if we didn't unite and back up each other, then we wouldn't exist able to do annihilation. Many times the money that we got from the sale of arpilleras paid some child's medical fees or gave relief to a workshop family member. . . .
Nosotros women of Republic of chile who were involved in the struggle had a more than difficult time considering, as nosotros now realize, our men were so machista [male person chauvinist]. Instead of helping united states of america in those years, they pulled us down. Some of the women's husbands would not let them attend meetings or help in the preparation or with the solidarity piece of work. In those years, men never said, "Compañera, let'southward go out and struggle together to change the reality of this country." Women were the ones who fought. . . .
Equally a woman, I realized equally role of this procedure of fighting for liberty in my country that the myth that they had driven into our heads all our lives—that the homo is the one with the power and concrete forcefulness to command everything—only goes and so far. Information technology's relative, and it's similar all the other myths that they implanted in united states of america women. It was the women comrades who managed to end the military nightmare in our country; they had the strength that the men lacked or lost along the way. Women, who were always housewives, woke up and didn't submit until freedom returned to their land and its citizens. . . .1
Marjorie Agosín, a poet and man rights activist from Chile, recalls how the customs created by the arpilleristas was both a healing space and a means of advocating for justice.
The women who started this arpillera movement began their journey in the places of fearfulness—hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries. They told me how they would recognize one of their own: each carried a marker of pain. They would ask each other whether they were there for a vanished son or a husband and how many children had been taken, when they had disappeared. Violeta Morales, one of the founders of the motion, ever said that she was able to recognize her own grief in the faces of others. And they recognized the shoes worn out from walking the streets in search of their loved ones. Their offset conversations were heavy with the language of pain, but the exchanges rapidly turned into a language of solidarity. Slowly, they began to think of ways of uniting in a commonage projection that would transcend their private plights. Soon they gained the back up of the Vicariate of Solidarity, a branch of the Cosmic Church. This organization, nether the management of Cardinal Silva Henríquez, a noted human rights activist, was created to protect the country's victims.
. . . On many occasions, I visited the workshops where the arpilleristas gathered. Every bit they stitched, they spoke. Sometimes they needed to stop their sewing because the cloth was moisture with their tears. Merely mutual support and beloved allowed them to continue embroidering the stories of their children, those they had lost, and their country. The art of the arpillera combines the individual pain of each of these women with the collective pain of all Chileans.2
Equally the number of workshops grew, and the arpilleristas gained confidence in their voices, they decided to stage public protests. Like-minded to use only peaceful methods, including dancing solitary in public squares and chaining themselves to public buildings, mothers, daughters, and sisters of the disappeared took to the streets. They marched around key plazas, and when the police dispersed them, they staged hunger strikes, some lasting weeks. The strikes led to more business about the disappeared, both within Republic of chile and internationally.
In addition, with the assistance of the Roman Catholic Church, the arpilleras themselves found an international audience; the tapestries were smuggled out of Chile and bore witness around the world to the tragedy of the expressionless and the missing. Agosín writes,
The arpilleras were created as a response to censorship, every bit a manner to fight against the impunity enjoyed past government forces. They became an important vehicle for spreading the news most Republic of chile's situation. These pieces of textile traveled away: customs officials never suspected that these humble wall hangings had the power to transform those who touched them. The arpilleras made it to museums effectually the world, to the calendars of Immunity International, to the homes of exiles, and to many others who cared deeply nearly Chile.three
Amid growing domestic and international force per unit area, General Pinochet stepped down in 1990. Though his divergence from authorities was not a direct issue of the arpilleristas' piece of work, historian Peter Winn believes that the arpilleras were particularly successful "in making Pinochet the allegorical dictator and human rights abuser of the era" and "in creating international sympathy and support for his victims and opponents."4
A generation of artists in Chile continues to follow in the footsteps of these activists, using arpilleras to provoke discussions well-nigh how to incorporate the retentiveness of the missing into Republic of chile's history. These artists use art equally a fashion to showcase the power of women and the effectiveness of irenic protest.
In 2006, Michelle Bachelet was elected equally the first female president of Chile. Her male parent served in Allende'due south government and was imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet'south secret constabulary; he died of a centre assault in prison. Both Bachelet and her mother were also detained and tortured by the Pinochet regime and then sent into exile. To many people, Bachelet symbolizes the radical transformation of Chile since the dictatorship. She led the country equally president from 2006 to 2010, and after three years of serving in the United Nations, she was reelected equally president of Chile in 2013.
Citations
Source: https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-12/finding-voice-art