Streets, Citizenship, and the Politics of Gender in Allende’s Chile

Chapter two examines how those on the Left and Right alike crafted political narratives on the street that made new sense of these idealized views of the city and of citizenship. In an effort to fashion political opposition to Allende, women organized around the specter of food shortages, scarcity, and price inflation in the December 1, 1971 March of the Empty Pots. Circulating information and organizing meetings in the press, supermarkets, food queues, and hair salons, they politicized traditionally “apolitical” places. In so doing, they created new possibilities for political association and debate. They also made gendered spectacle of “reclaiming the streets” from Allende supporters, banging empty pots and pans to arguing that they were forced out of their domestic worlds by the “dire” lack of subsistence goods and into the contested space of urban politics. Studying this emblematic protest through the intertwined lenses of gender, politics and the public sphere, Chapter 2 reveals how the ephemeral political practice of protest effectively transformed gendered domestic tropes into legitimate political languages and into the bases for new, gendered, and conservative political identities.

Of Spoons and Other Political Things

Chapter 1 examines the connections between urban planning and political theory, with particular attention to how the state’s urbanization and industrial design programs of the 1960s and 1970s shed light on the era’s political debates over citizenship. It looks especially closely at the work of the state-sponsored industrial design team that was charged with reshaping both everyday objects like spoons, plates, and chairs, and the larger processes that underwrote the integration of industry into a national socialist economy. This chapter examines the connections between seemingly mundane or innocuous everyday objects, and the era’s most ambitious projects. It ends with a study of the building designed for and built to host the Third United Nations Congress on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III), which acted as a symbol of Popular Unity socialist modernity and a stage upon which its residents and visitors could practice an inclusive vision of Popular Unity socialism. The UNCTAD building was, in short, a public sphere rooted or grounded in public space and action. This chapter offers a unique view into multilayered visions for an “ideal” socialist city, and a model for the practice of a particular, modern socialist citizenship.

The Politics of Place in the “Cinema of Allende”

Chapter 5 studies documentary films as rich historical documents and creative political exercises. Chilean documentarians turned their attention to the streets in order to reconcile cinematic form and political commitment in the three years of Allende’s presidency. The films they made emerge as key sources for political history. They shed light on the struggle over urban spaces as a political tactic. They also proposed a complex and reciprocal relationship between political and aesthetic modes. Their films were creative attempts to engage and understand the relationship between politics and visual culture, and act as evidence of how styles and forms of political participation were rapidly and radically changing in the 1960s and 70s.

Political Palimpsests

Chapter 4 turns to ephemeral forms of public art, including posters, murals, and graffiti. This chapter occupies is at the very heart of the book. Connecting urban and visual studies with political and oral history, it suggests that ephemeral forms of street art allowed santiaguinos to open new spaces for political debate in the city center, factories, and shantytowns alike. Ephemeral forms of public art helped urban residents fashion both an innovative language of political debate and an alternative, inclusive geography of political participation. They transformed city walls into arenas of dialogue and brought their viewers into a space of wider political analysis. In fact, the political significance that posters, murals, and graffiti held was rooted in their very ephemerality. Meant to last for an hour or a day, they were often ripped or painted over, and new attempts were layered over older pieces, transforming city walls into palimpsests of political debate. They generated a visual style that allowed a host of actors to enter into public political debate and articulate an intricate, ever-changing political discourse. They ultimately remade the city into a political arena and rewrote the terms and limits of political citizenship in the post-war period. Street art, in short, simultaneously constituted and commented on a public sphere of political debate that was rooted in urban practices of occupation and appropriation.

Epilogue

The concluding chapter returns to the book’s different subjects, and studies how they took new shape in the early moments of the regime that toppled Allende and inaugurated a military dictatorship that ruled for close to two decades. It then turns to street photography as a case study for transformation and continuity in political practice and visual culture. It shows how photographers responded to political repression by fashioning a visual language that played upon the “objectivity” of the lens and the “transparency” of the image, fashioning an innovative genre of “creative testimony.” Street photographers ultimately turned images into the preeminent medium around which they could organize an active resistance movement. This perspective suggests that citizens responded to political violence by reimagining the tactics of political conflict they had developed in democracy into a rich visual and material culture of political resistance. In the absence of generalized armed conflict, ephemeral acts and visual culture became the most effective form of political engagement and resistance in Chile. They scrawled slogans and images on buildings, distributed leaflets, acted out fleeting forms of furtive political street theater, and crashed empty pots and pans as an ongoing form of aural protest. Developed in democracy but reimagined under dictatorship, these ephemeral practices were essential to the creation of clandestine networks of political association and organization after the coup.

A ganar la calle

Chapter 3 rounds out this analysis by investigating the month-long October 1972 Trucker’s or Boss’s strike. It looks at how this mobilization in opposition to Allende created new sites, forms, and identities of political conflict in factories, soup kitchens, and sidewalks; how it challenged traditional lines of political allegiance on the streets and in Congress; and, ultimately, how it set in motion a chain of events that shaped the September 1973 coup. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Allende supporters’ reaction to the strike, focusing on the new forms of political practice they created in the industrial area ringing the city center. Workers in these cordones industriales clashed with the state and opposition in their struggle to secure poder popular—laborer’s authority in the workplace. They fashioned new sites and forms of political practice and affiliation that spilled over the traditional lines of political association. Investigating these entwined contests over public space, Chapter 3 shows how the ongoing effort to “win the battle for the streets” allowed santiaguinos to rethink how and where they could politicize gender and masculinity, and change how participants understood the potential limits of political citizenship across political divides. Ultimately, it illustrates how the act of claiming public spaces became essential political practice, and how these efforts fundamentally reshaped the city’s political geography.

Introduction

Álvaro Ramírez’s documentary short, Brigada Ramona Parra, is a synesthetic exploration of urban politics in Chile. The folkloric group Quilapayun’s memorable interpretation of the Nicolás Guillén poem La Muralla, set to music in the late 1960s, initially dominates the movie’s soundscape. But the sound is jagged, cutting suddenly as the filmmakers follow members of the Communist Youth’s Brigada Ramona Parra (BRP) muralist “brigades.” Quilapayun gives way to the sounds of the young members’ chants, the rumble of the street, interviews, and everyday conversations that contextualize the grainy images of the Brigada. Ramírez’s camera stays with the ...

Conclusion

The concluding chapter returns to the book’s different subjects, and studies how they took new shape in the early moments of the regime that toppled Allende and inaugurated a military dictatorship that ruled for close to two decades. It then turns to street photography as a case study for transformation and continuity in political practice and visual culture. It shows how photographers responded to political repression by fashioning a visual language that played upon the “objectivity” of the lens and the “transparency” of the image, fashioning an innovative genre of “creative testimony.” Street photographers ultimately turned images into the preeminent medium around which they could organize an active resistance movement. This perspective suggests that citizens responded to political violence by reimagining the tactics of political conflict they had developed in democracy into a rich visual and material culture of political resistance. In the absence of generalized armed conflict, ephemeral acts and visual culture became the most effective form of political engagement and resistance in Chile. They scrawled slogans and images on buildings, distributed leaflets, acted out fleeting forms of furtive political street theater, and crashed empty pots and pans as an ongoing form of aural protest. Developed in democracy but reimagined under dictatorship, these ephemeral practices were essential to the creation of clandestine networks of political association and organization after the coup.