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1 Memorials to struggle
My sympathies lie deeply with the former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet (2006–10). Perhaps it is because she is a woman and she introduced gender parity to the cabinet. I am moved by her identity as a socialist who lost cherished loved ones, murdered by the Chilean dictatorship (1973–90). The reaction to Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende’s socialist experiment (1970–73) was violent and intense, unleashed through the mid-1970s and into the 1980s against leaders and militants of the left with whom Bachelet was aligned and, in some cases, intimate. Early in her presidency, Bachelet championed an agenda in consonance with the principles of those she lost, those who she remembers. In her final months in office and as a legacy of her presidency, Bachelet inaugurated a national museum of memory. She attempted to embrace a belief that families, lovers, and comrades did not die in vain.
Why has the question of memory, and in particular memories of struggle, war, conflict, and violence, exploded with such force today? It is certainly in part because memory is constitutive of who we are and how we interpret the here and now, and for many, many people, the here and now is deplorable. As a US Latin Americanist, I am mortified by the United States’ continued imperialist interventions, which are all too familiar as echoes of US actions in Latin America over the past century-and-a-half or more.1 As the daughter of US socialist parents and grandparents, I represent the most recent of at least three generations of struggle and dissent, the memories of which inform my analysis and action as well as my anger and despair.
We rely on memories to orient our understandings of the present. Collective memories, or social memories, are connective tissues.2 US academics trace contemporary paramilitary cultures, such as the extreme rightist Minutemen, or abortion clinic bombers, to Vietnam veteran militarism and alienation.3 We ask if Iraq or Afghanistan is another Vietnam in part because we experience the razing of homes and the killings of Iraqi men, women, and children, the incursions into Afghani villages, the unmanned missiles into Pakistan, as we might remember the carpet bombings, devastation, and killings of more than a million Vietnamese. Returning US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, physically and psychologically maimed from their actions, recall the continued national failure to care properly for returning GIs.4 Eight more Iraqis killed, another US missile explodes in a Pakistani village. We are incessantly reminded of utterly senseless violence and loss both present and past. In our search for explanations of what, exactly, went wrong, and how we became so unmoored, so powerless, we become melancholic, nostalgic, and reflective.5 We ask where meaning lies in the current wreckage, as well as what our children will face as we continue to dig a deeper morass.
In this book, I explore the politics of commemoration as a lens into the ways people attempt to make meaning of violent political memories, particularly the loss of loved ones in political struggle. Traditionally states have attempted to commemorate the past while projecting unity, peace, and purpose, often in the aftermath of atrocious violence in which states are deeply implicated. Official commemorations often take the form of monuments, which, as distinct from memorials, emphasize a victorious past over mournful, contemplative loss or sacrifice. But increasingly today we are also witnessing all kinds of society-driven efforts, in creative tension and negotiation with the state, to establish memorials, and to memorialize that which both challenges state violence and insists on alternative global imaginaries. Further, in a global context in which technologies of representation and communication are rapidly evolving, collectivities are innovating memorial making. In addition, “counter-memorial” movements have also sprung up internationally, both to mourn the dead and to spur political mobilization. These multiple efforts raise questions crucial to debates on the politics of memory regarding grief, empathy, and collective action that are now in constant flux.
Historians constantly debate the degree to which the present impinges on interpretations of history.6 Yet there is no doubt that memory profoundly informs how we understand the current juncture, and that our memories are a moving target in relation to an ever-changing present. There is a powerful dynamic between our memories and our identities. Traumatic memories deeply mark individuals and collectivities; traumatic events resonate well into the future.
The difficulties of integrating traumatic losses are hindered by political contexts that attempt to dehumanize violence and by some cultural contexts in which grief is seen as a private matter, best contained, hidden. In wars, armed conflicts, and in political repression, states inflict violence in ways in which the human consequences are often made to seem somehow divorced from the damage. Those left to grieve the dead are often expected to do so in private, perhaps in an honorable military funeral service, or amidst a fearful, even hostile political milieu that suspects their loved ones were complicit in their own demise.
In many, though by no means all, cultures, there is often a way in which grieving, particularly prolonged grief, is seen as self-pity and, therefore, as unacceptable. Joan Didion captures this sense of her society’s expectation that the aggrieved should heal quickly, that after the initial shock and the funeral, those who grieve should be on the road to recovery, to meaning, again. Instead, Didion writes that it is “the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”7
Didion wants her readers to allow for, to begin to understand, perhaps even to empathize with what serious grief might mean for those intimately experiencing such grief. While she might say that we as the non-aggrieved must grant time and space for the fragility, the instability of the griever, she also challenges us to take a close look at how we judge the aggrieved.8
Our distance, numbness, or our implicit insistence that others’ grief take place behind closed doors, borders uneasily on complicity, on enlarging the void rather than on imagining how we might begin to fill the void, through collective mourning. Struggles to integrate traumatic memories and events in revolutionary and affirming ways constitute essential tasks for our sense of selves and our communities, as well as for our activism toward the possible.
In Judith Butler’s essay, “Violence, Mourning, and Politics,” she urges us to imagine a global community built on shared mourning, on the assumption that all human life is equally precious and valued.9 Butler poses the challenge to the US citizenry to embrace an alternative, non-violent response to the violence of September 11, 2001. She approaches the theoretical task from a deliberate acknowledgment of the enormity of US force, in its many iterations. Such force, Butler argues, includes the capacity to harm significant swathes of humanity, and, therefore, requires our acceptance of responsibility for such harm. If we respond to the loss of human lives in New York City, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, with deadly force abroad, Butler suggests, then we accept that lives in one part of the world are inherently less worthy of life than our own. Butler strives to have us absolutely reject some “hierarchy of grief,” to empower mourning, toward a globalizing “recognition” of one another.10
Politics and the Art of Commemoration examines the questions of empathy, grief, and mobilizing through four sites of commemoration—the first an intensely statist project led by General Francisco Franco in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War; the second a fitful commemorative process in Lima, Peru, that emanated from an artist’s abstract sculpture to mourn violence; the third a multigenerational grassroots-initiated memorial in one community of Chile; and the fourth a stenciled image that began as a commemoration of the disappeared of Rosario, Argentina, and has since traveled the world to assume distinct memorial meanings. I suggest that memorials can be cathartic and empowering as well as conflictive, in ways that are unanticipated as well as anticipated, as catalysts for political dialogue, solidarity, and action.
I focus on four major memorial sites as portals into the complicated politics of struggle. Certainly other cases abound. Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Peru are not alone in sharing histories of intense political conflict, authoritarianism, repression, and transition from authoritarian rule. These four sites were chosen because of the distinctive and different ways they bring out the political and social subjectivities of the memorials’ protagonists, commemorative representations, and conceptual concerns, which together provide tremendous insights regarding the power and promise of the politics of commemoration.
I grew up in a radical US left household, where the dynamics of both historic and contemporary international revolutionary parties and struggles were a central part of our conversation. Coming from a family whose party politics were so marginal to US power intrigued me to places in the world where the organized left was not so marginal. I became immersed in intense study, activism, and human rights work on the US and Latin America, and I grew close to and was inspired by many activists, including those who lost loved ones. In performance theorist Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts, Taylor is constantly interrogating her own and others’ subject positions as they represent the horrors and resonances of places other than our own, in Taylor’s case, Argentina’s brutality under the 1976–83 dictatorship. Taylor worries that we are voyeurs, or worse, that we are “capitalizing on the suffering endured by others—for reasons that might include the need to establish a sense of cultural superiority over the violent ‘other’ or for professional advancement.”11 I appreciate her concern. I understand my study of the politics of commemoration in Spain, Peru, Chile, and Argentina as intimately linked to my political biography and activism, to US imperial might and complicity in the violence, and to a commitment to grieve, honor, and respect the dead and to be attentive to the living.
Commemoration as transformative
The politics of commemoration recognizes that commemorative processes are more than symbolic exercises to acknowledge the past. Memorialization can transform the meanings of the past and mobilize the present. States are born of violence and produce and reproduce violent, major trauma. There is, therefore, a state logic, often aided by a loyal citizenry, to doing the re-memory work of structuring a nation, of shoring up nationalism or patriotism in order to build state stability and represent the state in a non-violent, even glorious way.12 Rather than remembering the violence of war for what it was, conquering and claiming territory, killing and maiming, building armies and state coffers that are war “chests,” states use language and representations to reframe the violence as something other than violence.13 States adopt a language, a historical memory narrative that says we bought the island of Manhattan from the Indians, that we purchased Louisiana, that we settled the western frontier, and so forth.
Clearly, much official memorial work is essentially representing an image of a unified, strong state, particularly in the aftermath of major violence, such as war, where the state conscripts young men and women into the army to fight, to die, to be wounded, to sacrifice, for some purpose of state, and often with at least the initial consent of its citizens, who only have some of the story, or who have been lied to about the extent of the threat, or who really believe war can achieve security and victory. So it is all the more important in the aftermath of war to reclaim the nation and those who have died in service to the state, to convey a message of respectful thanks that nonetheless masks, or erases, or does gross injustice to the myriad stories and lives of those lost, the questions of “for what?” or “how could it be?”14 As the US continued its brutality and destruction in occupied Iraq, it was no surprise that the Bush administration prohibited the showing of the coffins, the dead bodies of the US soldiers being returned to their families. The prohibiting was an explicit erasure, an attempt to control or at least to limit the questions and the gravity of violent loss.
Photographs, video footage, images, and symbolic representations are potent tools of politics, even if it is difficult to gauge exactly how they come to bear on public opinion. Walter Cronkite’s valiant efforts to bring Vietnam into people’s living rooms played a profound role in helping to shift US society’s turn against the war. Dramatic images stay with us and can be mobilizing. This was the case with Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong militant, or Sam Nzima’s 1976 photo of ten-year-old Hector Pieterson being carried dead in another young man’s arms during the Soweto, South Africa uprisings. At the Hector Pieterson Museum of Soweto today, curators have fashioned a powerful narrative of anti-apartheid resistance from the grassroots, launching almost entirely from that photographic image.
Throughout Latin America and elsewhere, families have used photographs of the faces of their disappeared loved ones to press politicians into action, to struggle to determine their loved ones’ whereabouts, imprinted with the question/demand, “Dónde está?” Relatives have covered their hearts with the photographs, marched in silence, risked their own lives, chained themselves to fences, outted former torturers, and made memorials. The photographs are indexes, both markers and traces, once produced at least in part by the person who is now the object, whose image has now become a sign, a banner, an emblem, a conscience.15 As discussed in Taylor’s Disappearing Acts, the photographs of the desaparecidos evoke a lost, often youthful humanity, both haunting and at the same time accessed, claimed, and even iconicized by the viewers.16 The young faces evoke sadness, anger, and shock as viewers contemplate their fates. The photographs are powerful tools of political mobilization.
In Susan Sontag’s prescient analysis of the power of an emblematic photograph, one forever etched in our minds, Sontag captures a photograph’s commemorative capacity: “Strictly s...
