Allende Vive

Essays and poems published as a tribute to Salvador Allende on the centenary of his death.

This biography of Beatriz Allende (1942–1977)—revolutionary doctor and daughter of Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende—portrays what it means to live, love, and fight for change. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Beatriz and her generation drove political campaigns, university reform, public health programs, internationalist guerrilla insurgencies, and government strategies. Centering Beatriz's life within the global contours of the Cold War era, Tanya Harmer exposes the promises and paradoxes of the revolutionary wave that swept through Latin America in the long 1960s. Drawing on exclusive access to Beatriz's private papers, as well as firsthand interviews, Harmer connects the private and political as she reveals the human dimensions of radical upheaval. Exiled to Havana after Chile's right-wing military coup, Beatriz worked tirelessly to oppose dictatorship back home. Harmer's interviews make vivid the terrible consequences of the coup for the Chilean Left, the realities of everyday life in Havana, and the unceasing demands of solidarity work that drained Beatriz and her generation of the dreams they once had. Her story demolishes the myth that women were simply extras in the story of Latin America's Left and brings home the immense cost of a revolutionary moment's demise.

Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film reframes nostalgia to analyze how writers and filmmakers have responded to 20th-century dictatorial violence and loss in Spain and Chile. By reaching beyond reductive definitions that limit nostalgia to a conservative desire to defend traditional power hierarchies, Lisa DiGiovanni captures the complexity of a critically conscious type of longing and form of transmission that she terms “unsettling nostalgia.” Using literature and film, DiGiovanni illustrates how unsettling nostalgia imbues representations of pre-dictatorial mobilization during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the Chilean Popular Unity (1970–1973), as well as depictions of clandestine resistance to the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and the Pinochet regime (1973–1989). Positive memories of efforts to upend power hierarchies coexist with retrospective critiques that fissure romanticized views of revolutionary struggle. Unsettling nostalgic works engender deeper understandings of the complexities of political movements and how stories of resistance are meaningful today. By calling attention to the parallels between nostalgic modes that resist multiple injustices based on gender, class, and sexuality, this book traces an evocative continuity between Spain and Chile that goes beyond the initial work that links forms of militaristic authoritarianism. Scholars of Latin American studies, film studies, literary studies, history, women's and gender studies, memory studies, and rhetoric will find this book particularly useful.

The military coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 led to one of the most repressive military dictatorships in Latin American history. Although the coup's full origin remains one of the great mysteries of the Cold War, most assume that powers in Washington were largely to blame, given the long history of U.S. interventionism in Latin America. These assumptions were only strengthened by ongoing suspicions about the Nixon administration's role in a failed campaign to prevent Allende's inauguration in 1970. Providing a comprehensive account of the Nixon administration's efforts to undermine and unseat Allende, the book relies heavily on newly declassified records, addressing several crucial questions regarding U.S. involvement. The author explores several counterfactual scenarios to highlight important turning points and crucial decisions which contributed to the failure of Chilean democracy.

A photo-illustrated record of Chilean protest art, along with reflections on artistic antecedents, global protest movements, and the long shadow cast by Chile’s authoritarian past. From October 2019 until the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, Chile was convulsed by protests and political upheaval, as what began as civil disobedience transformed into a vast resistance movement. Throughout, the most striking aspects of the protests were the murals, graffiti, and other political graphics that became ubiquitous in Chilean cities. Authors Terri Gordon-Zolov and Eric Zolov were in Santiago to witness and document the protests from their very beginning. The book is beautifully illustrated with over 150 photographs taken throughout the protests. Additional photos will be available on the publisher’s website. From the introduction: In the conclusion, we take stock of the crisis of the nation-state in the contemporary era. This chapter brings events into the present moment, noting the ways President Piñera took advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to reclaim the streets of Santiago, a phenomenon echoed in countries across the globe. While most of the global protest movements were forced to go underground (or into the ether), the Black Lives Matter movement surged in the United States and drew massive amounts of support both domestically and abroad, suggesting a continued wave of grassroots protests. We close with reflections on the continued relevance of walls in a virtual world, the testimonial role that protest graphics play, and the future outlook for revolutionary movements in Chile and worldwide.

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.

A billionaire Holocaust survivor hires a writer to uncover the truth of Salvador Allende’s death, and they must confront their own dark histories to find a path forward—for themselves and for our ravaged planet. An expansive, engrossing mystery for fans of Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood, and Bill McKibben, from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden. Ariel needed money, and Joseph Hortha had it. Bound by gratitude toward the late Chilean president and a persistent need to know whether murder or suicide ended his life during the 1973 coup, the two men embark on an investigation that will take them from Washington DC and New York, to Santiago and Valparaíso, and finally to London. They encounter an unforgettable cast of characters: a wedding photographer who can predict a couple’s future; a policeman in pursuit of the serial killer targeting refugees; a revolutionary caught trying to assassinate a dictator; and, above all, the complex women who support them along the way, for their own obscure reasons. Before Ariel and Joseph can resolve a quest full of dangers and enigmas, they must help each other come to terms with guilt and trauma from personal catastrophes hidden deep in the past. What begins as an intriguing literary caper unfolds into a propulsive, philosophical saga about love, family, machismo, fascism, and exile that asks what we owe the world, one another, and ourselves. By boldly mixing fiction and reality, imagination and history, The Suicide Museum explores the limits of the novelistic genre, expanding it in an unsuspected and exceptional way.

The source of the narrative energy that creates such absorbing stories. Allende's very popular novels have attracted both critical approval and opprobrium, often at the expense of genuine analysis. This sophisticated study explores the narrative architecture of Allende's House of the Spirits [1982], Daughter of Fortune [1999], and Portrait in Sepia [2000] as a trilogy, proposing that the places created in these novels subvert the patriarchal norms that have governed politics, sexuality, and ethnicity. Rooted in the Foucauldian premise that the history of space is essentially the history of power, and supported by Susan Stanford Friedman's cultural geographies of encounter as well as Gloria Anzaldúa's study of borderlands, this study shows that, by rejecting traditional spatial hierarchies, Allende's trilogy systematically deterritorializes the elite while shifting the previously marginalized to the physical and thematic centers of her works. This movement provides the narrative energy which draws the reader into Allende's universe, and sustains the 'good story' for which she has been universally acclaimed. KAREN WOOLEY MARTIN is Associate Professor of Spanish at Union University, Jackson, Tennessee.