Article
TWO 9/11S IN A L IFETIME:
CHILEAN ART, T ERROR AND
DISPL ACEMENT
Macarena Gó mez-Barris
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
A b s t ra c t
This article analyzes ‘‘Two 9/11s in a Lifetime,’’ a San Francisco project and art exhibit
on the politics of memory, that addressed the simultaneous experience of living through
the Chilean military coup on September 11, 1973, and, the New York attack on the
Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The project and art exhibit are a way to
illuminate the complex relationship of US-based Chilean exiles, and the Latina/o sons
and daughters of exiles to historical memory, displacement, and political engagement.
Rather than center the psychological mechanism of repetitive and compulsive ‘acting
out’ as a primary mode of interpreting exiles’ aesthetic expressions, I look at the
political and social meanings, and social location of their cultural productions. Using
ethnography, textual analysis, and interviews, I explore the project by a group of
second-generation San Francisco-based Chilean exiles/artists, and their ability to make
social and political connections with other national experiences of trauma, specifically
the US national disaster on September 11, 2001.
Ke y wo rds
Chilean exiles; exile art; social trauma; September 11; memory
I n tr oduc ti on
This article focuses on remembering the Chilean national tragedy of the
military coup on September 11, 1973 from the vantage point of exiles, and
c 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1476-3435/05 $30.00
Latino Studies 2005, 3, (97–112) www.palgrave-journals.com/lst
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1 The 9/11 Collective
included daughters
and sons of Chilean
exiles Gabriela
Fischer, Macarena
Gómez-Barris, Axel
Herrera, Alvaro Lagos, Roberto Leni,
Ariel López, Mabel
Negrete, Pancho Pescador (Franz Fischer),
and Rafasz (Rafael
Sanhueza), all of
whom were based in
the San Francisco Bay
Area. Nicole Hayward, who is Honduran-American, was
also an integral part
of the group and
process.
2 I use the term Chilean exile as a way to
reference the ongoing
experience of dislocation, trauma, and
identity construction
that began in 1973
and continues
through this day, despite the 1990 transition to democracy in
Chile.
3 ‘‘Crear Poder Popular’’ was the Allende’s Popular Unity
government slogan
for building people’s
power.
4 Whether President
Salvador Allende
committed suicide or
was killed is contested. In either case,
he was forced to his
death at the hands of
the military.
more specifically, the daughters and sons of exiles residing in the US. For two
weeks during the month of September in 2003, a group of nine Chileans,
including myself, formed the 9/11 Collective1 to present an art exhibit in San
Francisco called ‘‘Two 9/11s in a Lifetime: A Project and Art Exhibit on the
Politics of Memory.’’ The project and art exhibit, shown within the historically
Latina/o Mission District, was premised on the concept of dialogue, particularly
about the meaning and irony of living through or dealing with the effects of two
September 11’s during the lifespan of one person’s biography. In other words,
the move to connect two dates through expressive culture, across historical
timescapes and geopolitical locations, reflected the social location of many USbased Chilean exiles,2 who had lived through both September 11, 1973 in Chile,
and September 11, 2001 in the United States.
For the most part, the main organizers of the exhibit were not directly
victimized by the military dictatorship, but they had been socialized within the
context of exile and the traumatic effects of political violence that deeply
impacted their parents, grandparents, and other family members. This secondgeneration of Chilean exiles came of age in the US with strong emotional,
familial and political bonds to the traumatic memories of their parents’
generation and stories. My work in this article is to show the effects of trauma
and history on different generations of Chileans residing in the US, especially
this younger generation. I also address how these two historical events shaped
both their ‘‘Chilenidad’’ – the ways that different groups of Chileans maintain
and enact their national identity in multiple, hybrid, and creative ways – and
their connection to other US Latina/os. Finally, I describe the process and
aesthetic works of the project as a window into the construction of identity and
politics among the daughters and sons of exiles.
September 11, 1973 marked the beginning of state terror, and the beginning
of the end of a social change project in Chile involving millions of people
who worked to create ‘‘poder popular.’’3 On September 11, 1973, the military
coup that dramatically overturned the socialist path in Chile was initially
accomplished by bombing La Moneda Presidential Palace and through the
death of democratically elected President Salvador Allende.4 These
traumatic events were the start of 17 years of Chilean dictatorship, which
included the disappearance of more than 3,000 people, the torture of tens of
hundreds, and the exile of hundreds of thousands more. During this time,
systematic violence was used against Allende activists and sympathizers as a
means of disarticulating the mass social mobilizations, and as a way of
carrying out a counter-revolution. Many exiles who fled the country, especially
in the first period from 1973 to 1978, had been victims of concentration
camps set up around Chile, and were subject to random ransacking of
their homes. Their families had been subjected to threats and they themselves
were forced into hiding. Moreover, many were under constant persecution
and surveillance by military forces. In short, exiles, like other victims who
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stayed in Chile, were left traumatized by the extensive human rights abuses of
the military dictatorship.
Chileans who survived September 11, 1973 and the subsequent collective
violence, including our parents and grandparents, were accustomed to waking
up on its anniversary with a mixture of dread, sadness, disassociation and the
unshakeable experience of horror in their minds and bodies. For instance, firstgeneration Chilean exiles have described to me the particular quality of grayness
they feel, and the flood of memories that come back to them each year, as if
September 11, 1973 were permanently etched into their psychological
calendar.5 Perhaps the first relief from this repetitive annual nightmare was
when General Augusto Pinochet, indicted for crimes against humanity,
genocide, and torture in Spain, was still in custody and at the mercy of the
British House of Lords. The widespread media and institutional acknowledgement around the world of Pinochet’s injustices momentarily broke the cycle
of past trauma for many Chileans. For exiles living outside of Chile, and for
victims of the dictatorship within, his arrest symbolized a visible and
momentous rupture with an official history that had refused to narrate the
intensity and complexity of state terror and its effects. It also granted
them legitimacy to continue to testify and identify with the consequences of
Pinochet’s regime.
T h e e x p er i e n c e o f e x i l e a n d ‘‘ C h o s en Tra u m a ’’
‘‘Exile,’’ Edward Said (1999) ponders, ‘‘is strangely compelling to think about
but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being
and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can
never be surmounted.’’ For Chileans who experienced state terror, the
insurmountable sadness of forced exile is often multi-faceted, including the
loss of dear friends and family members, the psychological pain and physical
memory of torture, the loss of a social dream, etc. It is not surprising then that,
after exile, longing, mourning and political critique would be predominant ways
of feeling and acting in the social world. Because of the protracted character of
the Chilean dictatorship, the truncated road to social justice, and the inability to
work through trauma that these conditions produced, many first-generation
exiles still hold onto the memory of the past as a way to make an identity for
themselves in the present. Thus, ‘‘ex-political prisoner’’ and ‘‘tortured’’ are
primary identities for many Chilean exiles, even some 30 years later.
For second-generation exiles, one might expect assimilation rather than ‘‘rift’’
to be, as Said suggests, the dominant mode of navigating through the new host
country. However, since many parents were by definition political activists with
strong ideological positions, they often passed on these values (either
intentionally or not) to their offspring. In many exile homes, dominant US
culture was viewed as ‘‘imperialist,’’ ‘‘decadent,’’ and something to be resisted.
5 I collected these
comments from informal conversations
at La Peña Cultural
Center, Berkeley, CA.
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Among young Chileans, this often produced a strong sense of identification with
the beliefs and icons of the past (e.g., Victor Jara, Allende, Che Guevara, anticapitalist). Although many second-generation exiles are bicultural and bilingual,
and are negotiating a place for themselves within the dominant society, they also
identify with their parents (and even grandparents) over the lost socialist utopia
of the early 1970s.
Vamik Volkan has coined the term ‘‘chosen trauma’’ to refer to the inability of
social groups to mourn past losses, as well as to how these losses are
transformed ‘‘into powerful cultural narratives which become an integral part of
the social identity’’ (Volkan and Itzkowitz, 2000). Suárez-Orozco and Robben
suggest that this theory speaks to the transgenerational passing of traumas,
where ‘‘feelings of shame, helplessness, and loss of self-worth are borne by each
generation in the belief that the next generation will undo the past harm and
humiliation’’ (ibid.). This ‘‘transgenerational passing of traumas’’ seems to bear
out in the case of exiles; at the same time, I suggest that there is a more positive
dimension to this transmission. For instance, among the powerful cultural
narratives that get transmitted to younger Chileans by their parents is the
importance of social justice, human rights, and, more generally, political
engagement. This younger generation often shares in the psychological burden
of their parents, but they often also take on the social burden or mission so
central to the earlier generation’s formation as part of their own lives. Bharati
Mukherjee perhaps best describes this connection between the condition of exile
and politics:
Exile lacks the grandeur, the majesty, of expatriation. The expatriate, at least,
is validated by a host culture, which extends the hospitality, and he often
returns it in civic dutifulness. But the exile is a petitioner. He brings with him
the guilty reminders of suffering, his stay is provisional and easily revoked,
and he is often consigned to the underworld of ethnic intrigue, outside the
purview of the law or of the press. If expatriation is the route of cool
detachment, exile is for some that of furious engagement (Mukherjee, 1999).
6 In unpublished
personal notes written before his death,
Chilean exile Hugo
Mukherjee’s move to understand exile as ‘‘reminders’’ to the host nation, and as
the foundation for ‘‘furious engagement’’ evokes, for more than one generation
of exiles, the potential sources and making of a politics of exile, as well as a
politics in exile.
Although often understated, a perhaps obvious point is that the United States
was not an unproblematic site of designation for Chilean exiles. In an effort to
detach itself from the human rights record of previous administrations (i.e.,
Nixon and Ford), President Carter offered official political asylum to only four
hundred Chilean exile families.6 Many of the exiles boarded commercial planes,
their tickets paid for by church and human rights organizations. In contrast, the
social democratic orientation in Sweden, Belgium, France, and Denmark, and
the political support for the plight of Allende-supporters and activists there,
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created favorable conditions for exile resettlement in Europe. Moreover,
Caribbean and Latin American nations opened their doors to large numbers
of Chilean exiles. These exiles were sometimes forced to continue their journey
as dictatorships spread across the region (e.g., Argentina 1976).
Furthermore, contrary to the experience of the post-1961 Cuban exile
communities in the United States, the US Chilean diaspora after 1973 had a
schizophrenic quality to it. A short personal anecdote will clarify this point: As a
young girl growing up in Los Angeles and Sacramento I remember my exiled
mother constantly referring to the ‘‘dangerous foreign policies of the US
government’’ and her anger at the contradiction of living here. Coming of age, I
realized that these memories were consonant with a desire to dissociate from the
imperialism and corruption that the US represented in the Chilean exile
imaginary. At the same time, my mother’s rage, like many Chilean survivors,
was tied to the complex emotional field of being able to get out and away from
the reach of the physical threat of dictatorship.
After the 1973 military coup in Chile, artists, writers, filmmakers, muralists
and intellectuals were the explicit targets of repression by Augusto Pinochet’s
regime. Many of those who were not disappeared or murdered fled the country
in conditions of political exile. In their new places of residence, politics and
culture continued to be tied together, both as a way to denounce the continuing
repression in Chile, and as a way to provide spaces for other political agendas,
often those from other Latin American countries. The project carried out by the
9/11 Collective was a continuation of this exile history.
Rolando Leni Urbina
mentions that this
was one of the first
times, if not the first,
that the US gave official political asylum
to a politically Left
identified social
group.
Fo r m a t i o n o f t h e 9 / 11 Co l l e c t i v e
In the months following the September 11, 2001 attack in New York, whether
speaking at public events or talking with friends in the street, exiles could be
heard connecting the US disaster to the experiences of September 11, 1973. For
instance, Lisa Milos, a first-generation, San Francisco-based, Chilean exile, said,
‘‘For me it was a very emotional moment. In a sense I had lived the same thing,
twenty-eight years earlier.’’7 Milos’ comment was frequently repeated by
Chileans living in the United States who remarked on the irony of death and
destruction during two September elevens. The Chilean writer and scholar, Ariel
Dorfman, made similar observations, when he referred to the date of mourning
that September 11 had represented for millions of Chileans. He states, ‘‘And
now, almost three decades later, the malignant gods of random history have
wanted to impose upon another country that dreadful date, again a Tuesday,
once again an 11 of September filled with death’’ (Dorfman, 2004).
In the context of these connections, and in the aftermath of the first
anniversary commemoration of the Twin Tower tragedy in 2002, San Franciscobased Chilean writer and second-generation exile Roberto Leni Olivares
initiated the art project as a way to respond aesthetically to the coincidence
7 ‘‘Para mı́ era un
momento muy emocionante. Por que de
una manera vivı́ lo
mismo 28 años
atrás.’’ Quote taken
from Ariel López’s
video ‘‘Dos 9/11s en
una vida’’ (Two September Elevens in a
Lifetime) (2003).
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8 Within the literature on memory and
post-dictatorship in
the Southern Cone,
the term that refers to
our generation’s experience is postmemory.
9 This landscape has
included La Peña
Cultural Center in
Berkeley, Peña Moaı́
in East Palo Alto,
Sacred Heart Church
in San Jose, La Peña
del Sur in San Francisco, and ‘‘500 Years
of Resistance Committee’’ in San Francisco.
of dates. After talking to painter and nephew Rafael Sanhueza, they agreed that
perhaps the best approach would be to invite a group of Chilean friends and
allies to participate in a cultural project, working around the theme of two
9/11s. They also thought it would be important to speak to young people in San
Francisco, especially other Latin American immigrants and Latina/os whose
families had similar experiences of political terror in places like El Salvador,
Guatemala, and Argentina. In fact, all of the participants agreed that the project
needed to reflect the violence in Chile, as well as the disruption, aggression, and
trauma that many US-based Latina/os confront, either directly or indirectly. My
interpretation of this shared sentiment is that living with and among other
Latina/os created a broader consciousness and critique of terror and violence
among Chileans.
After some initial false starts, a core group of nine Chilean exiles between the
ages of 23 and 39 began to meet every 2 weeks over the course of 7 months in
2003. Early on, the group decided that the exhibit would take place in the
Mission District, both because of the location’s strategic proximity to other
Latina/o groups, and its distance from La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley.
While La Peña was founded and directed by first generation Chilean exiles
(many of whom were ex-political prisoners) and important cultural political
work had been accomplished there, we wanted a ‘‘fresh’’ and different space
from which to work and make art and politics. We sought to speak from a
younger generational perspective, since most of us had not experienced the
dictatorship in direct terms, but had been integrally shaped by the victimization
suffered by our parents and family members during the Pinochet regime.8
We began to articulate our intent and vision in two ways: First, we sought to
disrupt what we perceived to be dominant memorializing practices in the US
(e.g., in the media and specifically through the invocations of nationalism)
during the first anniversary of September 11, 2001. Second, we wanted to
contribute, as sons, daughters, and in some cases grandsons and granddaughters, to the cultural and political landscape that Chileans had produced in
the Bay Area for more than 30 years.9 There was general consensus that the
project should center Chile’s tragedy as a way to recuperate historical memory,
and that the Latina/o dimension was important in our focus and outreach.
We expressed our general sentiment in the main exhibit panel, which read:
Many of US approached the issue with compassion, understanding the longterm and lasting effects of mass violence, and how violence produces scars on
lives and nations. One young Chilena was less patient, saying ‘Now they’ll
take this date from me too.’ This phrase, though simple, is important and at
the center of the project and exhibit ‘Two 9/11s in A Lifetime.’ ‘Now they’ll
take this date from me too,’ refers to many things, including the unequal
distribution of collective pain suffered by Chileans as the result of September
11, 1973 and the irony of US support and involvement in the military coup. It
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refers to the importance of remembering Chile’s 9/11 in the United States, and
how commemorations of 2001 will now always overshadow the loss and
trauma of 1973. And, although the phrase might sound as if defeat was
inevitable, it actually articulates a desire for historical memory and witness
from the marginalized South, in the powerful North. We, a group of mostly
Chilean intellectuals, writers, and artists, came together to counter ‘Now
they’ll take this date from me too’ through representation.10
Through these words, we sought to articulate the ironic meaning for US-based
Chileans of two historical dates mired in terror and social trauma. The words also
expressed a desire for empathy with the victims of terror in the US, without eliding
the impact and importance of both national events. Moreover, in the above quote,
we made visible the political stakes in remembering Chile, a decidedly small nation
in the South often outside of the gaze of US historical memory.11
While tensions in the group emerged around logistical issues, program
content, and how best to display the art and its message, the 9/11 Collective
achieved a surprising degree of cohesion and agreement about the main
objective of our work, which was to center Chile’s 9/11/73 counter-history, and
thus reclaim the historical record. We also wanted the project to have longevity
beyond its closing date. Thus, documenting the project by producing a
catalogue and through subsequent writing about the event, were important
means of disseminating the project’s work beyond the San Francisco area.12
There was a high degree of self-consciousness and a sentiment that we had the
power to document, and therefore represent ourselves.
Let me briefly locate and expand on my role in the project, and, my
simultaneous role as ethnographer. As the daughter of a Chilean exile and of the
112 generation,13 many of my peers and friends are other Chileans living in the
San Francisco Bay Area. As a part of the group, I was both ethnographer and
group member. Amanda Coffey (1999) discusses the ways that ‘‘the distinctive
dependence on social interaction and relations establishes field work as a form
of personal identity work.’’ She also suggests that there is always reciprocity in
ethnographic fieldwork relations, where relationships develop over time. In this
case, my dual role as member and as researcher were collapsed with my
individual identity as the daughter of a Chilean exile, the basis for the cultural
and political work we carried out as a group. In other words, the social
experience of identifying as Chilean exiles was the point of departure we shared
for creating the art exhibit and project on the politics of memory.
E x h i b i t i n g c u l t u ra l m e m o r y
During conversations in the organizing process, we thought it would be
important to show ourselves as the 9/11 Collective. After numerous debates
about how to best do this, we decided to orchestrate a group activity for the
10 Panel written by
the 9/11 Collective
for ‘‘Two 9/11s in a
Lifetime,’’ September
5–25, 2003, New
College of California,
San Francisco, CA.
11 In Chile there are
currently 15.1 million
people (National
Census, 2003).
12 Nicole Hayward
and I designed and
produced the catalogue for the project
and exhibit, which
included photographs
by Nicole Hayward,
Alvaro Lagos, art by
Rafasz, Mabel Negrete and Pancho
Pescador, a short
story by Roberto Leni
Olivares, and an introductory essay that
I wrote.
13 This refers to
those who were born
somewhere else, but
grew up in and are
fluent in the dominant codes and language of the ‘‘host’’
nation.
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14 Juanita Riloff was
a well-known Mission activist that was
commemorated at the
event. During that
evening I participated
in the performance,
and, took ‘‘field’’
notes on the events
that transpired
around me. Thus, I
experienced the event
as both ‘‘insider’’ and
social ethnographer.
opening night of the art exhibit. After an introduction, readings from writers, a
video and a short lecture, the house lights of the cultural room of the New
College of California dimmed in preparation for the closing performance. We
were clad in black and walked to the front of a diverse 300-person audience
with candles in hand. The purpose of the cultural act, as Roberto Leni Olivares
stated, ‘‘was to create a space where we could name those we wanted to
remember, people who tried to make things better and paid dearly for their
commitments.’’ In turn, members from the 9/11 Collective announced a name or
group and the audience responded with a period of silence and applause.
Carmen Rojas was among those commemorated. A little known activist during
Salvador Allende’s government, Carmen Rojas was a victim of Pinochet’s
regime. From 1974 to 1977, she was held captive for 3 years at Villa Grimaldi
and Tres Alamos concentration camps, suffering torture and sexual violence at
the hands of the DINA (National Directive Intelligence Agency), the secret
police of the dictatorship.
At the end of the cultural act and performance, I asked the audience, ‘‘Who
would you like to commemorate?’’ For a minute there was silence, and then I
asked the question again, this time more forcefully: ‘‘Who would you like to
commemorate?’’ Slowly, audience members began to stand and state the name
of a person or group that had experienced the pressure and oppression of terror
and its aftermath. The victims of the World Trade Center and those who were
disappeared in Pinochet’s Chile were among the first to be named. And as the
audience and voices gained momentum, people began to simultaneously stand
up. In fact, in a very moving response over the next hour, audience members
alternatively stood and spoke, commemorating victims of the Salvadoran civil
war, Guatemalan genocide, ‘‘political prisoners everywhere,’’ ‘‘Mapuche victims
of dictatorship and economic development projects,’’ and more personal
commemorations for local activists who had since passed away.14 The
process of publicly naming and thus linking victims and activists from around
the Americas, had the effect of producing memory about seemingly
disconnected events.
In many ways, the performative act by the 9/11 Collective was a form of
cultural memory, enacting the terror imaginary of dictatorship and other forms
of systematic violence. It was also an astounding instance of public
improvisation; what began as testimony by Chilean exiles and sons and
daughters of exiles was transformed into an embodied scenario of political
alliances across national and historical experiences. Diana Taylor describes
cultural memory as ‘‘a practice, an act of imagination and interconnection. The
Intermediary begins to imagine her heart – her memory.’’ Taylor (2003) also
posits the profound ‘‘embodied’’ and ‘‘sensual’’ aspects of memory, which ‘‘links
the deeply private with social, even official, practices.’’ This participatory
performance, where dozens of audience members gave public witness, made it
possible to link the personal and collective levels of terror, dislocation, and
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resistance. The social identities of different generations of exiles, produced out
of violent political acts, activated relevant and meaningful cultural memory
with other social groups.
A ri el L ó p e z
During the opening program, Ariel López showed a video written, filmed and
produced specifically for the exhibit. His documentary, also called ‘‘Two 9/11s
in a Lifetime,’’ is a short color and black-and-white film that deals with the
opinions of first generation Chilean exiles discussing the impact of the attack on
the twin towers in New York, the politics that the disaster animated, and their
own traumatic experiences as political prisoners and exiles.15 In the video,
López works to make visual bridges between the bombing of La Moneda
Presidential Palace by the Chilean armed forces, and the ‘‘bombing’’ of the Twin
Towers. He choreographs the opening sequence as an interspersed montage of
black and white scenes from September 11, 1973 with color footage of
September 11, 2001. The screen is dark at the film’s opening, but on the
soundtrack we hear screams. As the montage begins, we see that the screams are
coming from both geographic locations as multitudes run away from the centers
of disaster. By portraying these similar scenes of terror, López breaks the power
of dominant narratives of ‘exclusive rights’ on victimization; instead, showing
how the traumatic encounter with terror is central to the experience of Chileans
during the last 30 years.
In the course of the video, we meet several first generation Chilean exiles
living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fernando Torres, a survivor of
imprisonment and torture, says, ‘‘I remembered [September] 11th in Chile. It
was a memory. It was a flashback to see the building on fire.’’16 Earlier in the
sequence two first generation exiles describe their own encounter with violence.
Héctor Salgado states, ‘‘I left exiled in ’76, after three years of imprisonment. [In
Chile] the 11th was a surprise. No one could believe what was happening.’’17
And with a cigarette in hand Raúl Leni, a first generation exile living in
Denmark, describes, ‘‘They imprisoned meythey screwed up my lifeythey
tried to destroy me. The process of torture and imprisonment is meant to
destroy the person.’’18 In the quick transition between commentary on
September 11, 1973 and September 11, 2001, the exiles’ words suggest the
complexity of trauma and traumatic events. More specifically, the flashback
that Fernando Torres speaks of as witness to the destruction of the New York
Twin Towers is connected to the pain of torture and captivity in Chile that Raúl
Leni and Hector Salgado detail. At the psychological level, the repetition of
trauma is often experienced as a collapsing of time, reverting one to the pain of
torture and captivity in Chile during Pinochet’s reign. Through these images and
testimonials, López accomplishes a representation of the collapse in time-sense
that a traumatized individual experiences. This process, which psychologists
15 Here, I analyze
the first edition of the
video, as it premiered
that evening. It has
since been edited and
shown at the San
Francisco Latino Film
Festival and other similar venues.
16 ‘‘Me acordé del
once en Chile. Fué un
recuerdo. Fué un
‘flashback’ de ver este
edificio en llamas’’
(my translation of video transcript).
17 ‘‘Salı́ exiliado el
año ’76, después de
estar preso por tres
años. El dı́a 11 mismo
fue inesperado. Nadie
pudo creer lo que
estaba pasando’’ (my
translation of video
transcript).
18 ‘‘Me metieron
preso. Me jodieron la
vida. Me trataron de
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destruiryproceso de
tortura y carcel es
destrucción de la persona’’ (my translation
of video transcript).
19 According to Judith Herman (1997),
in the moment of
constriction, ‘‘situations of inescapable
danger may evoke not
only terror and rage
but also, paradoxically, a state of detached calm, in which
terror, rage, and pain
dissolve.’’
20 See ‘‘Nov. 22
shaped TV’s role in
Writing, Informing
Nation on September
11,’’ by Tim Cuprisin,
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 20 November 2003.
describe as constriction,19 is central to how López communicates the merging of
the two 9/11s within the span of one lifetime.
From the vantage point of victims, it is possible that an over-identification
with the original trauma can have negative psychological and social effects. In
this sense, Dominick LaCapra (2001) describes the important distinction
between acting out (i.e., repetitive non-closure of a past trauma) and working
through the traumatic moment. LaCapra views the process of working through
traumatic events in this way: ‘‘Through memory work, especially the socially
engaged memory work involved in working through, one is able to distinguish
between past and present and to recognize something as having happened to one
(or one’s people) back then which is related to, but not identical with here and
now’’ (ibid.). In the case of the testimonials in López’s video, while there is a
psychological connection between both dates on some level, the interviewees are
not repetitively acting out their past traumas. Instead, I argue, there is a
particular historical agenda here, both by the director and by his informants,
which is consistent with the objectives of the 9/11 Collective. López and the
first-generation exiles he interviews seem to want to unmark the US September
11th experience as exceptional, and, as somehow not tied to other historical
tragic events. In a sense, the short testimonies by Chilean exiles in the video
make visible the role of the US in other national tragedies, as well as the longterm effects of collective violence. López contributes to this message through the
editing choices he makes and other strategies of representations.
In terms of the film logic, López’s decision to center images from both places
and testimonials works to interrupt US mainstream reporting conventions of the
event. As Tim Cuprisin (2003) argues, the television coverage of the
assassination of President Kennedy put in motion a news convention that
persisted during the attack on the Twin Towers.20 Moreover, media reports of
September 11, 2001, according to Cuprisin, were consistent with and echoed
earlier television coverage of national crisis. For example, the ‘‘steady now’’ and
‘‘calm’’ narration by reporters like Dan Rather, was fundamental to how the
public viewed both televised events. Through narrative substance, López’s film
produces a different visual and audio account of the nation altogether, where
panic and chaos are the primary viewing experience, without the mediating
journalistic presence. Rather than packaging the story for the nation, López’s
visual montage displays the risks and horror of these events. In this mode of
story telling, the bombing of La Moneda Presidential Palace and the collapse of
the Twin Towers are made into parallel archives, unsettling what we know
about national crisis. At the same time, the film allows polysemic interpretations of the tragedies, a central feature of exiles’ multiple identities.
Ro b er to L en i -O l i va re s
If documentary film and video is a particularly important expression of the
Chilean diaspora, then fiction is the broadest aesthetic register of the psychic,
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physical, emotional, political and linguistic distance produced by exile.21
Fiction is a primary cultural form that documents both generations of Chilean
exiles’ complex and shifting condition. Describing his work, 9/11 Collective
member and writer Roberto Leni-Olivares says, ‘‘My short stories deal mostly
with the intricacies of communication, language, trauma, and transcendence.
And like any other writer, my life’s history is the source of inspiration. Therefore
Chile is very present, Chilean culture, my experience as an exile in the US, my
Latinidad.’’22 In the catalogue to the project and exhibit, short story writer
Roberto Leni-Olivares (2003) evokes how a disappeared father is ever-present
Figure 1 A detail of El Muro de la Memoria, Santiago, Chile. Catalog cover by Nicole Hayward.
21 For writing by
and about fiction
writers on exile, see
Whitlar and Aycock,
1992; Partnoy, 1988;
Robinson, 1994, and
Aciman, 1997.
22 Interview with
Roberto Leni-Olivares, September 1,
2003.
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23 ‘‘Dis-appeared
Words,’’ Catalogue
for ‘‘Two 9/11s: A
Project and Art Exhibit on the Politics of
Memory’’ LeniOlivares (2003).
24 Part of this
broader experience is
also his identification
with English and
Spanish fluency, a
marker of ethnic
identification as Latino/a (see Wall, 2003).
25 ‘‘Testimony of
Words,’’ unpublished
short story, Roberto
Leni-Olivares.
26 Since the ‘‘Two
9/11s in a Lifetime
Exhibit’’ many of its
members have gone
on to work on border
art projects, individual shows, and have
begun similar working groups.
in a daughter’s conversation and thoughts, even in the space of a party.23 The
story uses song titles (e.g. ‘‘Matador,’’ ‘‘Burning and Looting,’’ and ‘‘They Dance
Alone’’) and props (e.g. ‘‘Life’’ cigarettes) as symbolic gestures of the ghostly
presence of the disappeared.
Unlike other 9/11 Collective members who arrived in the US, either too
young to remember the dictatorship, or after high school and some college in
their early 20s, Leni-Olivares came to San Jose with his exiled father, mother
and five of 10 siblings when he was fourteen. His stories portray the complex
immigrant and exile experience of his generation and also sympathize
with those of his father’s generation who arrived in California as older adults.
For instance, in an unpublished story entitled ‘‘North of a Tree’’ (Leni-Olivares,
2002), the elderly protagonist, Pablo, finds himself lost in San Jose one day,
driving aimlessly around the city until he finally locates the home of some
dear family friends. When the friends point the familiar route home, Pablo
realizes his error. At the end of the story, as the protagonist laughs out loud
until tears run down his face, we find out that the San Jose Parks and
Recreation Department has cut down his familiar guidepost, a large palm tree
on a corner near his house. In these narrative moments, Leni-Olivares
identifies with a broader Latina/o immigrant and generational experience of
dislocation and adjustment.24
Leni-Olivares’ aesthetic expression is often a social act of testimonial.25 In his
stories he reveals very personal biographical accounts of seeing and being near
dictatorship terror. In fact, four brothers were held and tortured in concentration camps in Chile, and his father was imprisoned for 3 years in the Valparaı́so
jail. Similarly, during meetings, 9/11 Collective member and photographer
Alvaro Lagos raised his personal testimony of victimhood, survival and exile, as
part of the motivation and intent of his participation in the project and exhibit.
Although many of us had known that Lagos was profoundly impacted by
violence, it was not until we worked closely with him that he revealed how four
close family members were disappeared and executed by the Pinochet regime.
At many points during backyard planning meetings and lunches, as we tried
to articulate the contours of the project, these intimate encounters with
terror were transformed into the basis for positive collective action through
the art project.26
A l va ro L ago s
Consistent with the 9/11 Collective’s mission of narrating a counter-history,
Lagos’ photographs give voice to the dynamic legacies of the Allende
government, showing images of murals, theater and music performances and
instances of street resistance against the Pinochet regime. The photographs
document how the cultural and political movements of the early 1970s remain
alive in Chile today, despite the severe repression of cultural activists during the
dictatorship, including book burning, outlawing Andean instruments and
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Figure 2 Untitled photograph by Alvaro Lagos.
forcing theater groups underground.27 At the same time, Lagos’ pictures of
dictatorship brutality, which he classifies in the genre of photo-documentary,
provide a parallel context for police brutality in the US. Indeed, it is difficult
to make out where a sequence of untitled black and white photograph
takes place. In one untitled shot that suggests many possible urban locations,
the low camera focuses on a teenage boy, who is surrounded by four uniformed
men with swinging batons. By exhibiting photos of dictatorship and photos of
police brutality side by side, Lagos subtly calls attention to the increased
surveillance and violence on civilian populations that is a result of both
national tragedies.
I would like to insist that in these forms of expressive culture, the sensitivity
to violence, and the proximity of second generation exiles to its consequences,
constitute a practice of social witness that illuminates the contradictions in the
official history of September 11 in the US. It is plausible to interpret this project
as ‘‘a compulsive preoccupation with aporia, an endlessly melancholic,
impossible mourning and a resistance to working through’’ (LaCapra, 2001),
since so many of the works look to the Chilean dictatorship past and
victimization as central subject matters. However, like López, Leni-Olivares and
Lagos use their traumatic experiences as a source of politics, where the identities
as victims, witnesses, exiles and immigrants are a location from which to make
personal links to comparative social phenomena.
While it is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss all of the work, the
majority of the pieces called upon the Chilean legacy of violence, terror, its
aftermath, and its complex and unending effects to make themselves legible
27 Interview with
Alvaro Lagos,
September 3, 2003.
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within the US political landscape of national tragedy. On the one hand, the sum
effect of the aesthetic work called attention to the ‘‘other 9/11,’’ an experience
that creates trouble for a US audience that is unfamiliar with this history.
Knowing Chile’s 9/11 makes it difficult to deny the imperial character of US
policy; it also makes it impossible to claim that national suffering belongs
exclusively to its citizens. On the other hand, the fact that the social identities of
these Chilean exiles’ (and the sons and daughters of exile) were born out of
national disaster offers a polyvalent critique of the instruments and agents of
terror. Thus, nationalism and belonging is displaced by an effort to build
coalitions among other communities, who have experienced similar horrors.
The performance at the end of the program on the opening night of the exhibit,
where Guatemalans, Argentines, Mapuches and Mission activists were all
commemorated, is perhaps the best indication of the way that exile and culture
are sources of political connection with other US Latina/os.
Conclusion
28 Katarzyna Marciniak (2003, 66)
elaborates on transnational exile production and its
characteristic resistance to one national
category.
In this article, I have argued that the cultural production and experience of the
9/11 Collective illustrates the complex working and reworkings of exile identity
in the US, especially for a second generation of Chileans, whose relationship to
dictatorship violence is, for the most part, indirect. Rather than viewing these
efforts as compulsive repetition of traumatic experiences, I have illustrated how
exiles’ identification and actions can create a new sense of cultural politics and
possibility. The writers, photographers and visual artists in the 9/11 Collective
display a wide range of knowledge about politics in Latin/a America, the US,
and other parts of the world. For this ‘‘younger’’ generation of exiles, the
experiences among Latina/o communities and the process of identifying with
one’s own Chilean history serves as the basis for ethnic and political
identification in the US. At the same time, the members of the 9/11 Collective
resist one national identity, seeing themselves instead as exiles with at least two
national reference points.28
The project of the 9/11 Collective suggests that groups of exiles/immigrants
with the experience of terror and displacement have the opportunity to draw
upon these histories in their host countries to create new cultural imaginaries.
Not unique to Chileans, immigrant/exiled Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Argentines, etc. also have embattled national histories of violence and
trauma that are tied up with US policies of intervention, and the subsequent
geo-politics of memory and forgetting. In the US context, these experiences can
produce transnational political subjectivities and identifications that can
facilitate dialogue and coalition building with other similarly located populations. This is not a static national identity that is unchanged by the new
environment. In fact, for many Chilean exiles and immigrants, the US
transforms their notion of ‘‘Chilenidad.’’ For the members of the 9/11
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Collective, living in the Mission District among a heterogeneous group of
Latino/as and creating friendships with other Latin/a Americans has been an
important experience of solidarity.
As an act of rewriting national tragedy, the 9/11 Collective situated Chile’s
September 11, 1973 military coup as the object of narratives about cultural
expression and commemoration. One of the goals of the project and exhibit was
to remember Chile’s dictatorship and its legacies on multiple generations and
the victims of terrorism in the United States. Another objective was to disrupt
the ways that memorializing practices about September 11, 1973 erased the
historical experience of Chileans who worked for Salvador Allende’s socialist
project and social dream. It is the particular combination of exiles’ experience
(produced out of state terror and terror in the US), and its cultural and strategic
use by a group of second generation Chilean exiles that offered a space for
reflection, dialogue, and witness to an unforgettable date.
A b o u t t he a ut h o r
Macarena Gómez-Barris is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern
California in the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity and the
Department of Sociology. Her forthcoming publication, ‘‘Michael Jackson
and Post-Op Disasters,’’ co-authored with Herman Gray, will appear in
Television and New Media (2005).
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Latino Studies (2005) 3, 97–112. doi:10.1057/palgrave.lst.8600115
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