Sep. 10, 2008 - Issue #673: Sex in the City 2008
Once de Septiembre: Chile’s September 11
La lucha continúa
The sign outside downtown Edmonton’s Ukrainian Centre reads, in
simple black letters, Viva Allende.
Inside, the smell of empanadas from the basement kitchen entices you as you
enter. Faint strains of classical guitar coming from up the stairs mingle
with the conversations, mostly in Spanish, of the small groups huddled
together in the lobby.
The walls of the cavernous main hall are draped in red banners and lined
with faded photographs, yellowing newspapers and boldly coloured
posters—many bearing the visage of a bespectacled, moustachioed man,
others eerie rows of small black and white photos of young men and women. A
series of speeches have just concluded, and in the basement a documentary
is about to begin.
For Vlad Gomez, this Sunday afternoon is a familiar scene, one that brings
back a flood of his earliest childhood memories of growing up in
Edmonton.
“That’s what I remember being a part of—even at five, six
years old—going to all of these things with my family and my
Dad,” Gomez, now 34, recalls. “The different organizations
he’d work with, the marches. That’s what the ‘80s was, a
lot of education.”
One event in particular, from the mid-‘80s, comes to his mind, when a
young woman who had survived being set on fire for her participation in a
pro-democracy demonstration visited the city to share her story.
“I just remember when she walked in, there was a room full of people,
and people just started weeping.”
Such intense recollections are familiar to many in the hall, members of
Edmonton’s Chilean community who came to the city as exiles and
refugees over three decades ago in the years following the September 11,
1973 coup in Chile which ended the three-year-old Popular Unity government
of Salvador Allende and ushered in 17 years of brutal military dictatorship
under General Augusto Pinochet.
As the first democratically elected Marxist in the Western Hemisphere,
Allende’s moves towards socialism in Chile—including
nationalization of key industries and the aggressive implementation of
social programs to benefit the country’s impoverished
majority—drew the ire of both conservative elements of Chilean
society and the Nixon administration, which for years was active in the
destabalization of Allende’s government and gave support to the
military coup.
In the years that followed, Pinochet implemented a severe program of neoliberal economic policies, and the dictatorship was responsible for the systematic violation of civil liberties and human rights, including the banning of political parties and widespread torture, assassinations and “disappearances” of political opponents. A report released in 1991, the year after Chile finally returned to a civilian government, estimates that 2300 Chileans were killed and some 30 000 tortured during Pinochet’s 17-year reign.
Like Gomez, Sandra Azocar’s youth in Edmonton was dominated by the
tragic events of her homeland.
“We grew up around political meetings, we grew up around cultural
events, we grew up around these types of events,” Azocar says.
“We didn’t have a childhood per se; everything we did was so we
could support the cause in Chile, all our activities were always around
that theme. We never had camping trips or anything like that. And
it’s not a bad thing, we’re not bitter about that, because it
made us who we are today.
“But this is why we call ourselves a lost generation,” she
continues, “because we really had no time to grow up. We were kids
one day and then we were exiles the next day and that’s
it—there was no in-between.”
While their stories are unique—Azocar was a young schoolgirl on that
Tuesday morning and she can still recall bombs falling on a government-run
radio station just blocks from her family’s home in Santiago, while
Gomez was born after the coup—they, and the families of many of their
contemporaries, shared a similar path to Edmonton.
Their fathers were among the tens of thousands of students, workers,
trade unionists and Allende supporters detained by the military in the days
and weeks following the coup, which saw the Moneda, the presidential
palace, bombed by the air force in an attack that also resulted in
Allende’s death. An estimated 40 000 Chileans were rounded up in the
days following the coup and held in Santiago’s national soccer
stadium.
Azocar’s father never returned from work on September 11, and she
didn’t see him until a year later, when her family was able to visit
him in Chacavuco, a concentration camp for political prisoners in northern
Chile. Gomez’s father—a member of the Communist Party—was
also detained.
In 1974, both men were among the thousands exiled to neighbouring
Argentina, and were joined later in the refugee camp outside of Buenos
Aires by their wives and children. Both families spent a year in Argentina
before being granted visas to come to Canada as refugees.
In the years following the coup, thousands of Chileans fleeing the
political persecution of the Pinochet regime arrived in Edmonton, settling
in neighbourhoods like Millwoods, Castledowns, Clareview and
Beverly.
In the 1970s, there were few government or settlement agency programs for
refugees, and many Chileans found the support they needed in the
city’s progressive community—the labour movement, the NDP and
other socialist and solidarity groups.
Despite the roots that did grow in the community, most of those who came to
Edmonton thought they would only be in Canada for a short time. Litzy
Baeza, a 34-year-old whose family came to the city in 1975, conducted a
series of interviews with Chilean refugees as part of the research for her
Master’s thesis on the experience of Chilean exiles in Edmonton. She
says the notion of imminent return informed how the city’s Chilean
community evolved in those early years.
“In the beginning everyone had their luggage packed. Everyone had the idea that they were just going to be here for a while and they were going to go back and continue with their struggles,” Baeza explains. “So they never thought future-wise, they just did things for the moment and tried to build this community for the time being. That’s how this ethnic community evolved—because they were very strongly trying to keep a national identity, trying to keep this culture of exile with them, always thinking that they would go back to Chile. Once they realized that they were here for the long haul, people started to then assimilate into Canadian culture.”
With the thought of immediate return fading as the dictatorship tightened
its grip on power in Chile, the vibrant cultural and political community
Gomez and Azocar recall so vividly evolved in Edmonton.
Education about human rights violations in Chile and solidarity efforts
with those fighting the Pinochet regime continued throughout the
‘80s. As the community became more established, they began to provide
support for new waves of political refugees coming to Canada from countries
like El Salvador and Guatemala, which were facing dictatorships similar to
the one in Chile. Chilean exiles also increasingly became involved in the
same movements for social justice and human rights they had struggled for
in Chile, becoming a key part of the labour movement and political left in
Edmonton, all the while involving their children in their activities.
“One thing I learned is that it wasn’t just about Chile,” explains Gomez. “It was about the labour struggle here, and it was also about solidarity with Nicaragua and El Salvador. I learned that it wasn’t just about my country and what happened there, it was all connected. ”
As the community commemorates the 35th anniversary of the coup that brought
them to Edmonton, people like Gomez and Azocar—the children of those
who lived through the coup and built a life in exile—feel a
responsibility to continue the work of their parents and to keep the memory
of what happened in 1973 alive.
This commitment to remembering is the impetus behind the Once de Septiembre
commemoration being organized on September 11 by the now-adult children of
those who fled Chile and struggled to put roots down in Canada.
“For us, being sons and daughters of Chilean exiles, we lived that
process, even though we might have not been born in Chile, or came to
Canada at a very young age, we still grew up with the exile concept of
being away from the homeland,” says Azocar, who will act as the MC of
the event. “So for us to have the torch passed on to us is a very
important thing in terms of keeping the Chilean community alive here and
keeping us with an identity of who we are and where we came
from.”
“It’s a duty,” agrees Gomez, who will perform as one-third of the political hip-hop trio the People’s Poets. “Because I think I grew a lot from the experience and it’s shaped my life. It’s part of our identity and there’s a lot of richness in the history and the culture ... and I’d love to pass it on to the next generation.
“A lot of people sacrificed, and so for us it’s really important to remember that sacrifice and keep it present and pass it on and continue that struggle, obviously in a different way—we’re a different generation living in a different context—but we have to keep the memory alive, in any way possible.” V
El 11
As part of the Once de Septiembre commemoration, local filmmaker Sergio
Olivares–who was born in Chile less than two months after the coup
and exiled with his family to Canada—will be premiering his
documentary short, El 11, which tells the story of the coup and the
experience of the Chilean diaspora through the voices of the Edmonton exile
community.
“My motivation was to help document the experience of the exiles here
in Canada,” Olivares explains. “My reality [as a child] was one
where I was surrounded by amazing individuals that fought everyday for the
struggles of human rights not only in Chile, but around the world. What
they gave me was a moral compass with the ideology to respect humanity, to
respect human rights and not just respect it but fight for it. My
responsibility is to develop programming that helps teach the stories of
those people.”
Olivares began collecting footage for the film when he was 15, through his
participation in the public access program Nosotros, which has been on the
air in Edmonton since 1981, and currently runs on Shaw cable.
“Nosotros was a community program that came out because we needed to
explain to the Latin American community and also Canadian community what
happened to us,” explains Medardo Azocar, a former millwright who
fled Chile with his family (including daughter Sandra), and who has worked
on Nosotros since its inception. “The program was to denounce a
dictatorship, human rights violations and other things. And that’s
work that was needed.”
Azocar is pleased that Olivares’ involvement in the show has led to
the documentary, and that he and others of his generation are using art and
music to carry the memory of the coup and the exile community
forward.
“I’m so proud of him. That’s 100 per cent important
because that history, we can’t forget it. That history what happened
to us, our children, our grandchildren—they have to remember what
happened to their parents and to their grandparents. They continue going
on, in culture, language and they remember what happened to us.”
V
Thu, Sep 11
(7 pm)
Once de
Septiembre: Chile’s September 11
Featuring: Voces
del Exilio presentation by Litzy Baeza, The Unmarked Grave Art exhibit by
Gabriela Rosende, Screening of the Film El 11 by Sergio Olivares, music by
the People’s Poets
Stanley Milner Library Theatre
(7 Sir Winston Churchill Sq)
Admission by donation
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