Vic Riveros Schober

MEMORY, INTANGIBLE HERITAGE AND STORYTELLING IN THE SECOND AND THIRD GENERATION OF THE SOUTHERN CONE DICTATORSHIPS’ DIASPORA 

During the 1970s and 1980s, significant waves of people form the Southern Cone of Latin America (particularly Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay) spread around the world as the result of the right-wing dictatorships installed in the region.

In the UK, many children and grandchildren of the people who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s from the Southern Cone of Latin America still reside here, with complex relations with their heritage and identity. The second generation has slowly put together their histories, reaching coherent narratives about certain events (for example, Pinochet’s arrest in London, Serpente, 2011, Ramírez, 2012), but little is known of their current relationship with memory and heritage.

My project aims to explore how the children and grandchildren of the people who migrated to the UK in the 1970s, because of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, make sense of their family and personal histories and to understand what role creative storytelling might have in bringing new meaning. It has been shown in other contexts that different generations use different narrative devices to make sense of their family’s histories (Faúndez & Hatibovic, 2016). As such, they are not passive receptors of the past, and they use these memories to interpret the present.

Within a qualitative methods framework, I will conduct discussion groups and creative writing workshops to explore the relations of diasporic experiences and a sense of identity. This project will contribute to a better understanding of the experiences of long-settled, yet understudied, diasporic groups in the UK; to understanding the impact of the memories of violence and migration on people’s identities, and the role of creative practices in the elaboration of the past.

Catherine Gilbert, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Philippa Page, School of Modern Languages, Newcastle University

Jara, D., Badilla, M., Figueiredo, A., Cornejo, M., & Riveros, V. (2018). Tracing Mapuche Exclusion from Post-Dictatorial Truth Commissions in Chile: Official and Grassroots Initiatives. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 12(3), 479–498, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijy025