Textile Auto/biography: Protest, Testimony, and Solidarity in the Chilean Arpillerista Movement

• Published in: Biography (Honolulu) Vol. 45; no. 1; pp. 28 - 49
• Main Author: Ortiz-Vilarelle, Lisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Honolulu University of Hawai'i Press 2022; University of Hawaii Press
• Subjects: Academic disciplines; Activities of daily living; Adams, Art; Agosín, Marjorie; Arson; Artisans; Biographies; Censorship; Countryside; Curfews; Death & dying; Dictators; Dictatorship; Disappearance; Feminism; Heterosexuality; Hospitals; Kidnapping; Mothers; Police; Policy making; Power; Rape; Resistance; Safety and security measures; Socialism; Storytelling; Surveillance; Textile fabrics; Textiles; Torture; Victims; Witnesses; Women; Chile
• ISSN: 0162-4962; 1529-1456; 1529-1456
• DOI: 10.1353/bio.2022.0016

General Augusto Pinochet installed himself as president of Chile in 1973 after lead- ing a military coup to oust democratically elected President Salvador Allende. The security measures Pinochet installed to subdue resistance included surveillance, curfews, public torture, arson, and bombings enforced by death squads. The mili- tary police of the New Chile tortured tens of thousands of civilians and claimed thousands of lives. Over 200,000 more people were forced into exile throughout the world (Galván 146). Pinochet successfully remained in power until 1990, due in large part to the organized efforts of the National Secretariat of Women (NSW). Led by his wife, First Lady Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet, this nongovernmental, policy-making body mobilized conservative women in a nationwide campaign against socialism and feminism—two ideologies thought by Pinochet to have infected the sacred institution of the family during the Allende administration. To this end, the NSW was empowered to discipline women who resisted the 29Ortiz-Vilarelle, Textile Auto/biography retraditionalizing laws and practices of Pinochet’s Chile. Unless women behaved like docile, feminine, heterosexual ladies, they were, at best, vilified, harassed, and denied public services. At worst, they were kidnapped, imprisoned, raped, and exe- cuted. Because any auto/biographical signature in this environment could cost a person their life, Chileans needed to invent methods of subverting censorship to document the human rights violations they endured. This essay considers the arpillerista movement in Chile, a political and artistic movement of women empowered to fight dictatorship with the storytelling power of folk art, with tapestry as their medium. Unemployed widows, mothers, and oth- er relatives of those detained and disappeared by the military Junta embroidered arpilleras to sustain the leftist spirit the dictatorship worked so tirelessly to destroy. The arpillera, which literally means burlap sack, is a traditional form of burlap-backed, appliquéd, and embroidered wall hanging, often made from fabric donated through ecumenical efforts. Decorated with colorful scraps of fabric and stitched with inexpensive thread, this cheerful fiber art’s central theme was pastoral, depicting harmonious daily life in the countryside communities (McCracken). Under the Pinochet regime, this traditionally feminine needlework was trans- formed into a method of subverting censorship to disseminate visual testimony of resistance (Shea). Beginning in 1975, arpillera workshops allowed women to work collectively on this compelling form of dictator-era storytelling while earning an income and finding release in self-expression about their shared condition. As they encountered one another in morgues, hospitals, and government offices seeking information and services, they quickly realized that these public offices would not meet their need to tell their stories as well as if they united in support of one anoth- er (Agosín, “Threads of Hope”). Their arpilleras of protest and solidarity against the police state were appliquéd with photos and embroidered with messages that often revealed biographical information about their loved ones, including their names, dates of birth and death, and the torture, kidnapping, and other acts of vio- lence committed against them (Shea). By recognizing the arpillerista movement as a materializing and memorializing auto/biography of life and death under Pino- chet’s dictatorship, we become witnesses to the particularly gendered trauma of the mothers, wives, and sisters of the victims, whose powerful collective counter-discourse commemorates the systematic disappearance of individuals and the silencing of the generation vigilada, or “generation under surveillance.” This essay establishes three levels of auto/biographical resonance in the Chilean arpille- ra: the biographical documentation of the victims memorialized in the tapestries; the autobiographical storytelling of the artisan mourning the victims and life in pre-Pincohet Chile; and the auto/ethnographic work of Marjorie Agosín, whose work with the artisans and their arpilleras is the subject of numerous auto/ biographically based studies of Chilean women’s narrative arts of resistance.