Children, Broken Families, and National Trauma in Contemporary Dictatorship Films in Chile (2024)

Their lives after: Theatre as testimony and the so-called ‘second generation’ in post-dictatorship Argentina

Journal of Romance Studies. Revisiting postmemory: The intergenerational transmission of trauma in post-dictatorship Latin American culture, 2013

In this article, I will examine the play Mi vida después [My Life After], in which six professional actors present and re-enact the stories of their parents' experiences of state terror in Argentina, as well as their own relationship with that past. In other analyses of this production, authors have turned to Marianne Hirsch's notion of postmemory in order to examine the generational dimensions of trauma and its remembrance. I will argue against this approach to understanding the experience of the so-called 'second generation' in Argentina in general and the 'hijos de desaparecidos' [children of disappeared] in particular. Instead, this article aims to show how Mi vida después highlights the need to search for new categories that can account for what this group of former child victims has lived firsthand. In addition, I will suggest that this play could be understood as a collective performance of testimony that relates not to the atrocities committed in the recent past as such, but to how those who were children at the time, whether or not they were physically affected by state violence, deal with the legacy today.

Reclaiming the Narrative of a Generation: The Representation of Argentina’s Last Dictatorship Through Cinema

2020

Over 453 films have been made focusing on the topic of the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), otherwise known worldwide as the Dirty War. This time period is characterized by the vile human rights abuses committed by the military junta against those who opposed the government, leading to the disappearances of 30.000 people, many of whom left children behind. These children were often forced to grow up, giving up their childhood, due to their parents' militancy. In the national story of the dictatorship, these children's stories and experiences have often been forgotten. This thesis will investigate the portrayal of the last Argentine dictatorship through cinema, from the perspective of children who grew up during the dictatorship, often children of the disappeared. These films often focus on the recreation of identity, their disappeared parents, and the loss of childhood innocence. Through fiction and documentary film, these filmmakers are able to use a self-reflexive process to recreate their identity and self-represent their own stories, rather than fitting into the narratives forced upon them.

"The living bond of generations" The narrative construction of post-dictatorial memories in Argentina and Chile

2015

This dissertation aims to understand how people connect their biographies with historical and recent collective events. Through the concept of generational narratives, life-stories of individuals born after dramatic periods of political violence in Argentina and Chile, are examined. By recounting two generations’ stories in two post-dictatorial countries, political paths, economic divergences, and cultural differences are disclosed. In these contexts, collective memories of and processes of coming to terms with those difficult pasts are entangled in periods of neoliberal economic transformation, political polarization as well as youth mobilization. Every ‘generational site’ brings to the fore a narrative plot which encompasses past events and present processes of meaning attribution. The investigation shed lights on Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of ‘the living bond of generations’, i.e., how past and present times are lively connected through generational bonds, memories and stories.

Introduction (Special Issue Revisiting Postmemory: The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Latin American Culture )

2013

"Cinema and Recent Past in Argentina"

In Argentina, the last military dictatorship ruled between 1976 and 1983. Since the return of democracy in December of 1983, a variety of means have—to a large extent—made it possible to unravel and represent the horror endured during the years of the so-called “National Reorganization Process.” The aim of this presentation is to address the different discourse strategies used in motion pictures representing the kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance of persons during the last military dictatorship. To this end, I have selected Argentine films that, having been produced in different decades, allow me to trace an historical evolution in the treatment of this topic. These films portray the adaptation to life in illegal detention centers in different ways. From an analytical perspective, my starting point in each chapter is a “memory cycle” (Da Silva Catela 2006), a concept I shall often resort to, since it defines the different socio-historical periods in post-dictatorship Argentina.

Memory and the spectator in post-dictatorship Argentina: misreading D'Angiolillo's Potestad

Studies in Hispanic Cinema, 2005

This article draws out the implications of Luis César D'Angiolillo's Potestad (Argentina, 2002) for contemporary debates on post-dictatorship memory in Argentina, as well as for current theories of spectatorship in film. Potestad forms part of a revisionist agenda that calls for a greater heterogeneity in post-dictatorship memory and seeks to reposition the violent repression of the most recent military regime within the broader context of the ideological conflicts of the 1970s. While the film initially appears to call for a psychoanalytical interpretation of its events and characters, it ultimately insists on a political reading; moreover, my analysis suggests that it effectively points to the insufficiency of psychoanalytical models of spectatorship to explain how meaning is constructed in film.

Sins of the Father(land): Redefining Postmemory in Contemporary Argentine Literature

In the aftermath of state terror, memory has emerged as a significant and perhaps contentious topic. The particular type of memory considered in this article is that of the children of those who suffered state repression. The wider impact of events and how these are remembered is a growing area of memory studies and has seen the implementation of terms such as multidirectional memory, absent memory, prosthetic memory and postmemory, the latter being the one most often applied to children of the post-generation. This article explores the literary legacy of the repression in Argentina during the dictatorship period of 1976 to 1983 (known as ‘El Proceso’), as demonstrated in the literature of the post-generation. Using Félix Bruzzone’s 2008 novel Los topos as its primary example, it will consider questions of second-generation memory and identity and explore the definition of postmemory, its suitability and applicability to the Argentine situation and the literary manifestation of this type of memory. This article demonstrates how works of contemporary Argentine testimonial literature not only redefine the concept of witness but also of memory and in particular, postmemory.

Betraying Heritage: A Reading of the 1970s in Argentina through Visual Arts and the Gaze of the children of the Disappeared (MPhil Thesis, Cambridge, 2007)

The Post-dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Collective Memory and Cultural Production

2012

("For sample chapter and browsing see: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=530423). In this project I reflect on how the Southern Cone postdictatorship generations reshape the collective memory of the dictatorial past through political activism and forms of artistic expression (cinema, literature, comics and photography). I situate their work at the intersection of the individual and the collective: it helps artists and activists elaborate traumatic events individually but it also has a profound impact at the collective level, and it is enabled by changes in the political context. Collective memory and intergenerational transmissions are key concepts for understunding these generations' emergence and contributions. The first part of my study focuses on Argentina, where this generation’s public interventions have broadened social involvement in remembering the past and encouraged learning from it for the sake of the present. In that respect, this generation’s participation is instrumental in achieving an “exemplary memory” in Todorov’s terms: a memory that allows us to draw lessons from the past in order to actively deal with abuses and social conflict in the present, and deciding which kind of society we want to live in. In the second part, I compare the exemplary achievements in Argentina with Chile and Uruguay, where political conditions are less conducive to genuine debate. The book is written for teaching, research and a non-academic readership."

The Concentration Camp and the ‘Unhomely Home’: The Disappearance of Children in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Theatre

Schindel, Estela y Pamela Colombo: Space and the Memories of Violence. Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception, 2014

The disappearance of children in Argentina has been examined in-depth using both psychological and legal approaches that have focused on the ‘private’ dimensions of this practice. There are, however, no spatially-oriented analyses to date that take into account the intrinsic relationship between the concentration camp (where most of those children were born) and the homes (to which most of them were transferred). This article will address the disappearance of children in its paradoxical state/private configuration, as a biopolitical phenomenon that is still taking place within the uncanny space of the ‘unhomely home’. In several of the plays written and staged about the disappearance of children, the ‘unhomely home’ is a predominant dramatic space which often recalls the concentration camps. But theatre offers more than a reflection of the concentrationary features of these homes: analysis of the spatial layout of these theatrical works also raises questions that other narratives have tended to disregard about the features of this particular space, its borders and the possibilities of escaping from it.