Chilean exile women in Vancouver: "They Used to Call Us Witches"

"They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean exiles, culture and feminism" by Julie Shayne is based on her sociological research of the Chilean exile solidarity movement, with a focus on women, and particularly on how culture and emotions played a role in triggering and sustaining this movement. The book features sometimes painful but fascinating stories of women who came together in the exile solidarity movement from different places, for different reasons, and in different points in their life. According to many of these testimonies, Chilean exile women performed their political work mostly in the shape of social services delivered to the exile community and laboring in the production of "peñas", the most emblematic activity of the solidarity movement. Moreover, aside from working full time jobs and raising kids, these women even found time to collaborate in projects that mixed feminist politics, artistic creation and a transnational agenda of solidarity.

I encounter this book partly as an insider and partly an outsider. My personal history links me to some of the stories that are told in this book: I was born in Chile a year after the coup, and went into exile between 1975 and 1980 to Colombia with my sister and my parents, who were MIR —Revolutionary Left Movement— militants by the time of the coup. In 1975 my uncle was kidnapped and taken to Villa Grimaldi, where he later died but remains disappeared until today. Soon after that, my dad was abducted from home and taken to the same detention centre, only he was released the next day. We left right after that with the help of family networks in Colombia. We returned in 1980, my parents got separated, quit their militancias, and I grew up in dictatorship Chile. I am then situated in generational terms closer to the interviewees' children than to their direct experiences of the Unidad Popular, the coup and exile. This will shape the way that I read the accounts and the analysis in this book, for example in relation to cultural practices of the Chilean left.

Other aunts and uncles involved with the MIR established in Sweden, Canada and California and in total, on my dad side we are 17 cousins who are spread in four countries, all of whom speak at least two languages, and all whom have felt both at home and foreign in the countries were they were raised and in Chile. Exile, then, is an experience that I know more from the perspectives of my cousins, who complained often about being recognized as Chileans in Sweden, and as Swedes in Chile.

Overall, I am excited to see research on Chilean women exiles with a focus on feminism. I especially agree on the relevance of recording and archiving the amazing stories of exiles, and to further a serious political and academic exploration of both the exile experience of what the "post-exile" subject can mean, in terms of memory, identity and agency. Could this be a hybrid subject, maybe what Haraway describes as a cyborg, part reality-part fiction, opening new venues for narration? Could the stories of Chilean exile women be read under the light of Chicana and queer theory to understand better the idea of inhabiting borders?

In any case, the experiences of exiles, of suffering but also of success and satisfaction, should be taken seriously and with the most academic rigor, and for sure never with the pretense of generating a univocal, totalizing account of exile that is inclusive of all experiences. Many traumatic events precisely become traumatic as they escape signification and remain stuck in the social body as unspoken symptoms. Thus, the necessity to come to terms with the fact that this story is polyphonic, contradictory, incomplete, fractured, and constantly re-imagined, as memory does not work as a repository of information. Quite the opposite, it works in a reconstructive way with the parameters of the present.

Likewise, as a task of feminist archival, I am glad to see the documentation of "Aquelarre" magazine, of the band "Cormorán" and the organization of the "Fifth Canadian Conference in Solidarity with Women of Latin America." Both the narratives around the magazine and the Conference are illustrative of the challenges of organizing around the political identity of "women." Feminist archives are key for a transgenerational feminist legacy.

I appreciate the thesis about the central place of emotions in fueling social movements, though I do not see it restricted to women, and I would add that these emotions appear as ambivalent: the sorrow of the loss of a country coexists with a sense of realization and belonging in Canada. I also agree about the place of culture in shaping the movement. However, putting together Gender-Emotions-Culture-Women sounds like a dangerous discourse to me. It is still not clear to me either why women stories demand for a special emphasis on emotions and culture, or if using a 'gendered lens' is a strategy to look for emotions in the first place, but in both cases, the underlying assumptions are dangerously essentialist and ideologically charged. I do not understand for example, why exile men's activities such as weekend soccer games —pichangas domingueras— are not gendered cultural practices; or how feelings of sorrow, guilt and embarrassment mixed with pride are not relevant in shaping male's experiences of exile. (And I find problematic that the way to deal with male's voices is for the author to speculate on what they would probably say.)

I am especially troubled by the fact that a book published in North America about so-called "Third world women," links women's political practice to emotions. Likewise, to characterize women as the "mothers" of the solidarity movement is likely to invoke and reproduce a discourse of sacrificial motherhood that is essentialist and heteronormative. For example, when women talk about the incredible pressure and amount of work that they had to deal with, I found that there was a romantic heroic tone to it, as opposed to being critical of why Chilean men were not performing house work!

Early in my life I was introduced to the term "machista-leninista" by my mom and her friends, who would mock the rigid, sexist and sometimes mysogynist gender ideologies that many left militants held. Because my own research aims to be critical of these gender ideologies that have characterized the discourse of Left in the recent decades, I felt compelled while reading this book to hear more critical analysis on the descriptions of gender relations as experienced in the solidarity's movement, for example, about how women provided free labor for the peñas —fundraisers for the solidarity movement— and did a lot of other work that was not considered important or did not even count as political. In this point I think we agree, that political practice needs to be defined in broader terms so that it includes chopping onions for peñas and not only speaking in public. For the longest time both conservative and progressive discourse in Chile have reproduced ideologically charged tropes like women's natural inclination to be caretakers, and specific ideologies of motherhood that assert women's moral superiority. The argument of linking only women to the transmission of culture, failing to see that men in exile are also socializing their children and being socialized in gender ideologies by their peers and partners, may suggest then that our 'gendered lens' need a new prescription.

Moreover, the book tends to reify Chilean culture instead of recognizing it as a site of political contestation within Chileans. This can be dangerously normative, as it enables the distinction between more and less "authentic" or loyal Chileans, or to judge one's allegiance by the performance of rigid symbols of Chilean nationalism. In this sense, I insist we ought to remain critical of our own political practice, which includes the (gendered) cultural practices of identity making in a solidarity movement. The peñas for me are the paradigmatic case, because, from the generational perspective of someone who did not experience the Unidad Popular firsthand, to reduce the whole memory of this incredibly interesting, epic, futuristic project to empanadas, vino and sad songs may not be as politically enabling, after all. Again, my contention here with the book is whether these cultural practices should be just taken 'as they came' or if we ought to be more critical of them in terms of their political effects.

I acknowledge that a white North American researcher is positioned in a complex place to be critical of cultural practices that are framed in the context of political repression in Latin America. But I think there are ways to deal with these complexities, see for example how Diana Taylor incorporates a systematic reflexivity of her position into her analysis of the political tactics of the Madres in Argentina (pages 16-27 of "Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War'").

On the other hand, even though Shayne claims central the relevance of culture in shaping the specific tactics of the Chilean solidarity movement in Vancouver, at the same time she asserts repeatedly that the Vancouver case is a "mirror image" of the experiences of Chilean exiles elsewhere and that if we ought to change the names it would be the same account in any other country where Chileans sought political asylum.

More serious however, is my disagreement with the book's explicit heteronormative assumption. I find problematic that the author assumes the authority to define other's sexuality as opposed to asking openly about one's self identification and how it relates to one's political practice. I also wonder why homoeroticism is not even contemplated as a relevant component of this love/hate story of nationalism and transnational solidarity in exile.

I was delighted during the moments when we actually "hear" the women's voices in the book. I found they were rich in representations, ideologies, imaginaries not only about gender and sexuality, but about national identity and space. For example, I found incredibly provoking the notions of a Chile with an "interior" and "exterior," or exile as the Fourteenth Region. Along the same lines, the metaphors of the military coup as natural disasters: a "horrible storm" and an "earthquake" are threads that I would have liked to see developed. Super interesting were also some women's accounts about "manipulating" their privilege and the military's gendered expectations to escape situations of possible political repression.