This art icle was downloaded by: [ Goldsm it hs, Universit y of London] On: 04 February 2014, At : 10: 36 Publisher: Rout ledge I nform a Lt d Regist ered in England and Wales Regist ered Num ber: 1072954 Regist ered office: Mort im er House, 37- 41 Mort im er St reet , London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia Publicat ion det ails, including inst ruct ions for aut hors and subscript ion informat ion: ht t p:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ cj la20 Ecomemoria's Diasporic Space of Commemoration: A Tree-Planting Ceremony and its Living Memorial Carolina Ramírez & Alej andra Serpent e Published online: 24 Jul 2012. To cite this article: Carolina Ramírez & Alej andra Serpent e (2012) Ecomemoria's Diasporic Space of Commemorat ion: A Tree-Plant ing Ceremony and it s Living Memorial, Journal of Lat in American Cult ural St udies: Travesia, 21:2, 189-202, DOI: 10.1080/ 13569325.2012.694808 To link to this article: ht t p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 13569325.2012.694808 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE Taylor & Francis m akes every effort t o ensure t he accuracy of all t he inform at ion ( t he “ Cont ent ” ) cont ained in t he publicat ions on our plat form . However, Taylor & Francis, our agent s, and our licensors m ake no represent at ions or warrant ies what soever as t o t he accuracy, com plet eness, or suit abilit y for any purpose of t he Cont ent . Any opinions and views expressed in t his publicat ion are t he opinions and views of t he aut hors, and are not t he views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of t he Cont ent should not be relied upon and should be independent ly verified wit h prim ary sources of inform at ion. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, act ions, claim s, proceedings, dem ands, cost s, expenses, dam ages, and ot her liabilit ies what soever or howsoever caused arising direct ly or indirect ly in connect ion wit h, in relat ion t o or arising out of t he use of t he Cont ent . This art icle m ay be used for research, t eaching, and privat e st udy purposes. Any subst ant ial or syst em at ic reproduct ion, redist ribut ion, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, syst em at ic supply, or dist ribut ion in any form t o anyone is expressly forbidden. Term s & Condit ions of access and use can be found at ht t p: / / www.t andfonline.com / page/ t erm sand- condit ions Carolina Ramı́rez and Alejandra Serpente ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION: A TREE-PLANTING Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 CEREMONY AND ITS LIVING MEMORIAL Ecomemoria comprises an intergenerational group of Chilean exiles living in the UK and in Chile who aim to keep alive the memory of and claim justice for those who were disappeared (desaparecidos) and killed (ejecutados polı́ticos) during Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973 – 1990). This piece draws on the authors’ recent participation in a specific tree-planting ceremony performed by this group in Wales. By looking at the relocation of bodies, and the enactments and artefacts within the site-specificity of this event, a reflection on both the diasporic space developed and the unexpectedly complex character of the “living memorial” the group aims to cultivate will be elaborated. Ecomemoria’s members match their living memory project with the trees that commemorate the life of the disappeared. Yet this conception here is complicated by highlighting the transnational, as well as the active, social, embodied and uncanny character of the ceremony which, as well be argued comprises a living memorial in its own right. This essay starts by briefly presenting Ecomemoria, to then describe and deconstruct the ceremony’s diasporic and haunting qualities. Finally, to conclude, a much more complex idea of a living memorial will be developed in consideration of the mobile, affective, embodied and ghostly mise-en-scène the ceremony produces. Introduction: Ecomemoria and the mobilization of a diasporic social body Ecomemoria is a transnational network of activists based in both Britain and Chile who aim to keep alive the memory of and claim justice for those who were disappeared (desaparecidos) and killed (ejecutados polı́ticos) during Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973 – 1990). They do so through a mobile form of commemoration consisting of a treeplanting ceremony which takes place in diverse locations of the different countries where the Chilean diaspora resides. The members of Ecomemoria living in the UK – who participated in the event in question – comprise a mix of first-generation Chilean exiles that arrived as adults, teenagers and children during the early years of Pinochet’s regime and today mostly reside in London. It also incorporates second-generation participants and third-generation children, many of whom have mixed migrant Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 June 2012, pp. 189-202 ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2012.694808 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 190 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES backgrounds. In a recent tree-planting ceremony in Powys, west Wales, a wider group of exiles who reside across the UK, as well as Latin American migrants from other countries and the Welsh local community, were also incorporated into this event. Even though among Chileans exiles in Britain, many actors are connected to each other by kinship, Ecomemoria activists are not necessarily the relatives of the victims commemorated in their ceremonies, as is usual in many of the commemorative groups that take part in memory initiatives in the Southern Cone.1 Ecomemoria was formed during the pickets first organized in London against the dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was detained on October 16, 1998. During that time, there, in Chile, the myths of a newly liberal, progressive and democratic postdictatorship country were being fruitfully cultivated.2 Meanwhile, here, in the UK, Chilean exiles’ active involvement in the public realm – through human rights and solidarity campaigns – seemed to have been finally superseded by the end of Chile’s long-standing dictatorship.3 At this juncture, breaking the mundane routines of thousands of people and interrupting the amnesic storylines of a nation, Pinochet, the dictator, was unexpectedly arrested during his stay in the London Clinic. The news travelled rapidly and a spontaneous gathering of men and women from different generations of Chilean exiles across the UK, Europe and beyond took place, forming what became known as “el piquete” (the piquet). Five hundred and three days of street protests, marches, vigils and mobilizations – which aimed to fight for Pinochet’s extradition to Spain and to keep the international awareness of crimes committed during the regime alive – ended in the British Government’s decision not to extradite him, and his subsequent escape from prosecution, on grounds of ill-health in March 2000. Lucı́a, a young activist who went into exile as a child, explained to us how after the trial was lost, an intergenerational group of Chileans based in London who had participated in el piquete “made a resolution” to themselves: “that we would not let the horrors of the Pinochet machine be forgotten once again!”4 Ecomemoria’s distinct ceremonies are part of a wider set of commemorative practices and spaces that remember the lives of the disappeared (desaparecidos) and those executed (ejecutados polı́ticos) by the Pinochet regime, led by grassroots groups which have emerged during Chile’s post-dictatorial era. Particularly, Ecomemoria’s project resonates with diverse “counter-memorials” which have taken place in Chile and have been recently analysed by Katherine Hite and Cath Collins.5 These countermemorials disengage from the official commemorations’ “funerary” logic, partly because of the lack of proof regarding the deaths of the disappeared, and because such a logic omits the presence of survivors (both victims and perpetrators). Like those counter-memorials, Ecomemoria demands and provides accountability of “the machinery’s genealogy and agents” and, by using spaces disconnected from the civic and political arenas, they also create “a peripheral geography of commemoration”.6 Yet, while in Chile those counter-memorials are circumscribed within the nation’s geographic territory, Ecomemoria’s commemorations are distinctive because the ceremonies always take place in different locations and cities in Britain and Chile and, more globally, in various countries in Latin America and Europe. This means that the areas and sites for the tree-planting are not selected due to their connection with Chile’s history of repression, such as the “Parque por la Paz” (Park for Peace) erected at the former concentration camp in Villa Grimaldi, that Diana Taylor has labelled after her description of her visit there, as one of the “dark sites” of memory.7 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION That particular memorial is made “in place” by the surrounding physical and social environment, as well as the narratives generated and contained there, whose immediacy to atrocity also gives it its significance. Hence, our first point is that, by commemorating the disappeared lives and planting trees in the different locations where the Chilean diaspora resides, Ecomemoria has created an itinerant social body able to connect distant territories. Not only that, but those changing geographies permit a “territorial liberation” from the concrete landscapes which evoke the dictatorial legacy. This piece will concentrate on one specific ceremony that both authors recently attended in Wales. Within this commemorative space we will follow the “routes” of the activists and the “roots” of the trees, evoking these notions as being at the core of diasporic formations.8 Both mobile and grounded modes of connection to place, we argue, converge (and are complicated once again) in the “diaspora space” created by Ecomemoria’s ceremony in the town of Machynlleth. According to Brah, in a diaspora space the “genealogies of dispersion” are entangled with those of “staying put”, where an essentialist ideology of return to a “homeland” is contested.9 The diaspora space suggests that affective attachments to the lived experience of locality are possible to forge, even if just transiently, in place. In what follows we want to look at these intricate connections as they are made in one particular commemoration. To reflect upon how those attachments and ties to space work, we will use Michael Hardt’s notion of “affective labor”: a mode of labour whose “effect” is immaterial but, nonetheless, is “entirely immersed in the corporeal” and based on “(virtual or actual) human contact and proximity”.10 It is immaterial because it produces “intangible affect”, which in turn, generates a bond among different individuals. The notion of affective labour allows us to see Ecomemoria as a “living memorial”,11 which is neither fixed in spaces nor simply “lived” by the enactments, negotiations or activities that surround it.12 In a more radical sense, living memorials like Ecomemoria are “made by” the embodied investments and affective connections they demand and not only “enlivened by” them. Immersed in a large crowd, we will witness and also contribute to the making of a human-scale affective space of remembrance. This, resembling Hardt’s notion of affective labour, is made by a network of bodies, activities and objects as well as intangible and elusive presences. On the embodied and diasporic nature of a living memorial On the grey and wet morning of August 13, 2011, in the Welsh hills of the Dyfi valley, in the town of Machynlleth, we begin to gather with other people in the cultural community centre that hosts this Latin American-Welsh event. The challenges of being a “minority” and historically “displaced cultures” appear to be a point of convergence, and a recurrent theme of discussion since the previous day among the Latin Americans, Welsh people and wider public who attended.13 We are at the festival “El Sueño Existe” (The Dream Lives On) which celebrates the life and work of Vı́ctor Jara, an acclaimed Chilean singer, songwriter, poet, theatre director and member of the Communist Party; and one of the many victims of Pinochet’s regime. The ceremony will commemorate the lives of two unknown victims 191 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 192 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES of the dictatorship: Marı́a del Carmen-Arrı́agada Jeréz, a primary school teacher, and Michel Selı́m Nash Sáez, a young man completing his military service during the time of the coup. Here, in the Welsh valleys, the stage has been set for everyone to begin to join in. Someone has chosen a particular spot, another has dug a hole, another fixed a plaque, a duo play guitars, a woman holds a child’s hand and many others come to watch, listen, call, respond and wait. A ceremony is gathering pace, as we all stand around two potted trees in anticipation. In the soundscape, the echo of the wind and diverse voices combine with the sounds of the Nueva Canción Chilena14 and Andean music. While we are all part of an indistinguishable group of actors and spectators, the members of Ecomemoria begin to put over their clothes distinctive white t-shirts that have the name of the organization (Ecomemoria, London-Chile) and the slogans “sowing the seeds of justice” on the front, and “sowing the seeds of memory” on the back. Despite this gesture of differentiation, people from the UK, Europe and Latin America, exiles and activists, children and adults will be briefly united through the common experience of inhabiting and creating new paths in this particular setting. Ecomemoria’s trees are never planted in the same place, and so the actors, objects and localities are always shifting and evolving. Changes and differences as we will show are not obstacles to be surmounted but, rather, strangeness and otherness appear to be part of a mode of recognition that can make of the ceremony a dialogical space. We are starting to immerse ourselves in a diaspora space where the boundaries between “them” and “us” cannot be clearly established and the presumed distinctions between hosts and visitors, actors and audiences are contested. This space, we propose, needs to move beyond what Taylor identified as her own “I presence” as witness during her analysis of her Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION guided visit to Villa Grimaldi, in the linear affective transmission of memory from survivor to witness.15 Rather, we suggest that the complex affective labour of the Ecomemoria ceremony proposes a much more expansive and reflexive encounter between social actors, that engages “survivors” and “witnesses” to think about their own positionality: a collective encounter that is transformative not only for those who come to that space as “visitors”, but for all of those present: building new affective ties between exiles and participants. Lived strangeness and displacement become points of encounter that can make a sense of a mobile and fleeting community emerge at one point in time.16 Everyone has gathered and we begin to walk together, forming a line, over a clearly delineated footpath of clay and mud. The slow pace of our walk is proposed by two children who hold the trees and lead the procession down the hill – Lea, a thirdgeneration daughter of Chilean exiles, and Jason, a Welsh boy. If you look from the front, behind the kids, you can also see the faces of the second-generation and those who went into exile as children, teenagers or youngsters. As before in el piquete, today in this ceremony third, second-generation and exile children can join together with their parents and grandparents. Not only the tree, but also (and maybe more importantly) the intergenerational involvement in the process(ion) of memory becomes an important aspect of the living memorial.17 It can potentially bridge gaps among generations by opening up the way for new stories to be told and for different people to contribute to making them come alive. In turn, the living memorial is a constant process that “acts through life rather than symbols” and continually “opens up rather than forecloses on discussion and debate”.18 By walking forward, holding trees, playing guitars, listening and murmuring, we not only become attuned to one another and immerse ourselves in the commemoration, but in a more basic sense, we are putting our bodies to work – a sign of the embodied role of agency in the process of memory. This is not a multiplicity of actors mobilizing their “efforts to have memorial projects recognised and realised”,19 but the memorial project is actualized there, with them, by the configurations they form while interacting with and becoming part of the social and physical space. By walking together to commemorate the victims of Pinochet’s regime we start to make a new trail of collective memory in the present, in a new geographical location and with a new human assemblage. The procession and the complex social encounter involved vividly embodies how the past can work as “a force, rather than a weight”, as a presence which “does not pull us back but presses us forward” on the path towards the trees.20 As we walk past a children’s playground and playing fields, we arrive at the edge of the community garden, where the delineated path is replaced by long and wild grass still wet with the morning dew. There the procession stops and we all form a semicircle, guided by the same bodily knowledge that has just aligned our bodies and tacitly routed our way up to this specific point. We are in line with the trees (standing next to us), which have been placed besides two recently dug holes, facing the Welsh hills in the distance. The members of Ecomemoria, first a couple of second-generation siblings and then two women who went into exile as children, loudly read the stories of Michel and Marı́a. We find out about Marı́a’s activism within her local community, her work as a teacher, mother, doctor, looking after the needs of the peasant women and their children. We then hear about Michel’s defiance when he joined the army at nineteen, shortly before the coup, as a member of the Youth Communist League, and his 193 194 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES subsequent refusal to take part in the repression and torture of political prisoners. He was taken to a detention camp, tortured, and later released alongside other prisoners in the desert, and shot in the back. His remains were dug up, crushed, and dumped in the sea. The young siblings recite:21 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 (First voice) But Michel refused to be silenced (Second voice) And he returns with every sunset with the spray of the waves and the cry of the seagulls, He returns each day in the mist of the camanchaca22 that bathes the Chilean desert With his emerald eyes, disheveled hair and the brightness of his conviction, Michel comes here today, to stand next to us, as we bear witness to the planting of this tree in his memory Because we have come, with this tree, to PRAISE HIM, not to bury him And with this simple gesture, with this tree, here, and now, we continue his memory and his dream for a better world . . . Porque El Sueño Existe! (Because The Dream Lives On!) These spoken words do not only function as ways of keeping alive the disappeared’s sense of commitment to social justice in Chile and rescue them from oblivion. By fusing Michel’s presumably extinguished life with the landscape of the Pacific Ocean and the camanchaca of the desert that witnessed his death, his life is relocated there, in Chile’s present and future. By planting trees here in Wales and by aligning them with other bodies that today inhabit that same place, the disappeared are offered a hospitable space in a new landscape. The words enacted, the movements performed and the relocated sounds form part of a perceptible evidence of a diasporic place of connection which, as such, is able to blur and transcend the distinction between there and here. The Ecomemoria ceremony in this respect extends beyond the “transformative power” of counter-monuments and memorials in Latin America, Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION where it has been argued that “agents infuse memorials” with their own memories and motives, turning monuments into “relational nodes presenting the past, acting and acted upon (and against) by individuals and collectives”.23 In contrast, Ecomemoria’s ceremonial space is produced through a different contextual and embodied modality that does not relate to specific monuments, but to a multiplicity of sites. The plurality of the diasporic sites of Chilean exile makes us look both ways, and acknowledge that by transcending British and Chilean borders, diasporic subjectivities occupy an “inbetween” space.24 This is a space which – despite being grounded through an embodied and situated connection – is capable of bringing together different temporalities, where the participants in the ceremony can come to resignify and relocate the past as a process that simultaneously “allows us to work through the present”.25 In this reinscription of diasporic space, an alternative dynamic emerges, occurring within the “double-frames” of the “local” and the “global” that diasporic subjects occupy and that challenges the territoriality of memory within fixed sites.26 The embodied commemorative practices of the Ecomemoria ceremony are imbued with overlapping complexities and differences that are at stake in this diasporic encounter, through which the haunting “irresoluteness” of the ceremony surpasses the new reconfigurations of remembering the disappeared, in the already established memory locales of the Southern Cone.27 In Wales, far away from the Chilean desert, the ghosts have travelled following the routes of those who, like many of us and maybe without noticing it, live haunted by them, or by the eras, memories and ideals they represent. Through this transformative recognition of the ghostly terrain, the act of memorialization is extended towards a wider audience to potentially make their own “uncanny” feelings reappear. 195 Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 196 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES As Avery Gordon explains, uncanny experiences are “qualities of feeling” which work beyond performers’ and audiences’ will. “There is something there and you ‘feel’ it strongly. It has a shape, an electric empiricity, but the evidence is barely visible, or highly symbolic.”28 In the ceremony, someone tries to catch this “quality of feeling” by taking photographs of the trees. Others do so by filming the speakers’ performances and speeches. But the haunting presence is “barely visible”. It does not reside in those who we are attentively listening to, nor in the trees that magically have distracted our gaze. The haunting presence’s “electric empiricity” is neither within these elements nor around this tangible social configuration. It is in-between all of us. It is here and, in Gordon’s words, we can all “feel it strongly”. It can move our gaze and align our bodies. It is there as a force that makes our own ghosts appear, making what we assumed disappeared, apparitional again. Despite being constituted by an elusive presence, the haunting ground of the inbetween space has the power to incorporate the current lived and situated realities of many of those who are in Wales today. The power of the Ecomemoria ceremony draws our attention to this significative affective presence that brings together disappearance and exile in the same diasporic space. After all, exiles are those “already long disappeared”, whose “unsettling” ordinary lives, often moved far from imagined heroic portraits, can be deeply uncanny in character.29 The lives of the disappeared are remembered not just posthumously, but as a matter of the present alongside the current lives of the exiles,30 an assertion that becomes vivid when, after the sibling’s recitation finishes, we are invited to loudly proclaim a well-known leftist utterance: Call: “¡Compañero Michel Nash!” (“Comrade Michel Nash!”) Response: “¡Presente!” (“Present!”) “¡Ahora!” (“Today!”) “¡Y siempre!” (“And always!”) By enacting this utterance in changing historical and geographical circumstances the symbols and signs that connect us to other places and times of being “can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew”, becoming part of a shared social history.31 Yet, it is not only the utterance’s intrinsic and deliberate meanings that are relevant to understanding this diasporic space, but also its form. For instance, the use of the Spanish language and the ability of the audience to respond to the call make manifest the routes of those who have navigated from Latin America to the UK. Language, together with the music played and other practices through which people “perform ethnicity”, can relocate the on-going experiences of dislocation and cultural loss involved in migration.32 These “hidden” migratory experiences that are brought to the fore by the utterance and the various other practices in the ceremony interrupt the linearity of the work of becoming members of the host societies: experiences of dislocation that are recalled at that very moment, “without being defeated by Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION [them]”.33 The specific use of Spanish in this utterance, in contrast to the use of English in the rest of the ceremony, mutually reinforces the intimate and dialogical production of the in-between space: not only for Chileans and Latin Americans, but also for the wider present milieu who can also claim their own diasporic inhabitations of this landscape, beyond normative ideas of integration and assimilation. The ceremony is coming to an end and the trees have been placed in the holes in the ground. The crowd is invited one by one to scatter some soil over them and water them with agua de boldo, which we are told is “a sacred water of the Mapuche people”.34 From the hands of the Ecomemoria members we receive wild flower seeds in sachets and are told to plant them “in our homes” or wherever we like. The seeds evoke the routes taken by Ecomemoria and its members, from exile, through el piquete, to here and, eventually, elsewhere. There is no guarantee what will happen to these seeds, yet, we argue, it is their dissemination among the participants that matters. From this point onwards, the seeds will hold the “potentiality” for us to keep the bonds we transiently formed during this commemoration alive, and by “cultivating” them, we can keep performing the affective labour we have started here on other grounds. The dispersed seeds, which are unable to be traced or located, could be found domesticated in our dwelling places or in some wild meadows growing as hybrid flowers. The potentiality of the seeds to populate new locations is also part of the living memorial’s extension of the diasporic space developed. Moreover, the processes of affective labour, living memory and cultivation appear to be similar since they do not involve a finished product but a continual process of nurturing. Finally, the act of “sowing the seeds” suggests that the condition that is required to reckon with our ghosts, with our diasporic subjectivities and with the unfulfilled claims for justice has yet to come – the promise is still in the future. 197 198 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 Conclusion: Moving towards a diasporic and trans-local space of commemoration We have brought to light ways of conceiving commemoration that, by combining transnational and grounded connections to space, echoes the experiences of those in the diaspora. Through this, we argue, Ecomemoria makes of presumably intimate and personal experiences of loss (i.e. death, disappearance, and exile), and a seemingly nationally bounded issue (i.e. state repression), themes that can transcend these frontiers and become matters of global concern. Ecomemoria and its mode of affective labour contained in the living memorial will eventually move on to other localities, where they will engage with new landscapes and new social actors. Collectively, they will continually re-create alternative affective experiences as modes of participation in public life which do not turn memories of repression and “traumas” into the basis for new models of victimization, but that can potentially bind pleasure and politics into one, and make intimacy and public spheres collide.35 Through our exploration of one particular Ecomemoria ceremony in Wales, we have shown that itinerant diasporic spaces can performatively emerge. It includes an “assemblage of people, things and narratives [which] are arranged in complex networks of activities”,36 which are not only limited to the trees and the commemoration of the disappeared. The presence of a wider audience at each individual tree-planting ceremony constitutes a complex web of transient affective ties which, as we have shown, are not solely predicated by kinship or direct links to the victims of the Pinochet regime. Hence, the living memorial is a process whose main outcome is not a finished product or message but, overall, the formation of an affective state in another person – at the level of thoughts as well as in terms of embodiments and emotions.37 Throughout the whole ceremony’s experiences and stages, bodies appear to be engaged with each other in the work of commemoration, a binding power which does not necessarily reside in the content of memories invoked or in the performers’ will, but in making the ceremony a space of affective connection through public (and uncanny) feelings. Ecomemoria’s spaces and practices of commemoration show us that the deployment of diasporic subjectivities cannot be simply confined to unbounded terrains articulated within fixed territorial and static referents. Instead, the fluid, embodied and haunted qualities of the commemoration that we took part in, brought to our attention the importance of looking at diasporas’ inventive ways of delineating new spaces of remembrance in the current transnational and post-dictatorial context. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the members of Ecomemoria for inviting us to partake in the commemoration in Wales. We are also very grateful to Cecilia Sosa and Paulo Drinot for their help with early drafts of this essay, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Notes 1 The possibility of lacking family bonds with the disappeared or dead persons differs from many commemorative initiatives, especially those that have taken place in Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Argentina and Chile since the late 1970s– 1980s and early 1990s in the periods of transition to democracy. In both cases, kinship ties and motherhood have been crucial components in the creation of commemorative groups, as Elizabeth Jelin reminded us during her presentation: ‘Victims, Relatives and Citizens in Argentina: Whose Voice is Legitimate Enough?’ (Paper presented at the 2010 Symposium at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, London, ‘Between the Past and the Future: Challenging Narratives of Memory in Latin America’). Moreover, kinship not only pervades the commemorative “social bodies” which openly invoke family bonds in their naming strategies (e.g. H.I.J.O.S and Madres Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, or Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos in Chile). It also infuses the making of those geographicallybased memorials which are often led and negotiated by groups who keep an intergenerational relation with those whose lives are commemorated in those places (see the Villa Grimaldi and Paine memorial sites in Chile). Katherine Hite and Cath Collins, “Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Reawakenings in 21stCentury Chile,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no.2 (2009). Tomás Moulian, Chile Actual: anatomia/mito (Santiago Chile: ARCIS Universidad; LOM Ediciones, 1997). See the different accounts of Chilean exiles’ engagement in the public sphere in Fernando Camacho, Suecia por Chile (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ed, 2009); José Del Pozo, Exiliados, emigrados/retornados: Chilenos en América y Europa, 1973– 2004 (Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2006); Julie Shayne, They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009); Thomas Wright and Rody Oñate, “Chilean Diaspora” in Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, ed. Melvin Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard (Springer, 2004). Words taken from a public speech delivered on August 13, 2011 in Wales by Lucı́a (pseudonym) a young volunteer-activist from Ecomemoria. Hite and Collins 2009. ibid., 383 – 9. Diana Taylor ‘Trauma as Durational Performance: a Return to Dark Sites’. In Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). While “roots” have traditionally served to evoke an original territory (or “homeland”) from which a dispersion has occurred, and towards which an ideology of return emerges, the notion of “routes” has served to complicate that scheme by emphasizing more fluid and deterritorialized identities and subjectivities. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), 181. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor”, Boundary 2 26, no. 2 (1999): 96– 8. To some extent we follow Allen and Brown’s notion of a living memorial which aims to “commemorate the life of a victim or victims through an assemblage of people, things and narratives that are arranged in complex networks of activities”. Yet, unlike Allen and Brown we do not want to focus on how affective labour pervades the processes (embodied and others) involved in the corporative and organisational character of Ecomemoria as a whole. Instead, we concentrate our attention on the 199 200 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 embodied, interactional and dynamic dimensions of one site-specific commemorative event. See Matthew J. Allen and Steven. D. Brown, “Embodiment and Living Memorials: The Affective Labour of Remembering the 2005 London Bombings”, Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011), 313. cf. Hite and Collins 2009. During the previous day of this festival, during a public colloquium and debate, the struggles for recognition of Latin American indigenous communities were highlighted by Welsh intellectuals and activists. They connected those distant experiences to their own national history of internal and external displacement to Latin America and beyond, a displacement that they attributed to British imperialism. The strong resonance of those memories, and their emotive hues, might well also relate with Machynlleth’s history of independence mobilizations against British rule as far back as the fifteenth century. The Nueva Cancion Chilena (new Chilean song) emerged in Chile during the 1960s. It was popularized by many artists (among them Vı́ctor Jara) during Salvador Allende’s political campaign and government in the 1970s. It then became a musical movement with an open political militancy. A brief can be found at review in: http://www. memoriachilena.cl/temas/index.asp?id_ut¼lanuevacancionchilena. Taylor 2012, 273. See Sara Ahmed, “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 329 – 47. Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 142 – 9. Allen and Brown 2011, 322 – 3. Hite and Collins 2009, 379. Vikki Bell, “Afterword: The Politics of ‘Memory’ in the Long Present of the Southern Cone” in The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, eds. Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 209. As performed and defined in the script made by Ecomemoria, and given to the authors. The camanchaca is a climatic phenomenon in the Chilean desert, which is described in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española as a “niebla espesa y baja” (a thick and low fog). Katherine Hite, Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (London: Routledge, 2012), 7. Homi K. Bhabha, “Culture’s In-Between” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). ibid., 59. Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulance of Migration (Polity Press, 2000), 105. ibid., 139. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (New University of Minnesota Press ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50. ibid., 84. ibid., 112 – 13. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 55. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 2003), Chapter 4; and Fortier, 2003. ECOMEMORIA’S DIASPORIC SPACE OF COMMEMORATION Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 33 Cvetkovich 2003, 119. 34 We interpret the use of the Mapuche water as both a “metaphorical” and a “real” alignment with other ethnically subjugated and displaced people, extending the ceremonial reach of this particular diasporic commemoration beyond the diasporic terrain inhabited by the exiles and the participants. 35 Allen and Brown 2011; Cvetkovich 2003; Ann Cvetkovich and Ann Pellegrini, “Public Sentiments: Introduction”, The Scholar and Feminist Online 2, no.1 (2003). 36 Allen and Brown 2011, 313. 37 ibid., 316. References Ahmed, Sara. 1999. Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement. International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3): 329 – 347. Allen, Matthew J., and Steven D. Brown. 2011. Embodiment and Living Memorials: The Affective Labour of Remembering the 2005 London Bombings. Memory Studies 4 (3): 312 – 27. Bhabha, Homi K. 1996. Culture’s In-Between. In Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by S. Hall, and Paul du Gay., 53 –60. London. Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Bell, Vikki. 2011. Afterword: The Politics of ‘Memory’ in the Long Present of the Southern Cone. In The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, edited by F. Lessa, and Vincent Druliolle., 209 –21. New York. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge. Camacho, Fernando. 2009. Suecia por Chile. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ed. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann, and Ann Pellegrini. 2003. Public Sentiments: Introduction. The Scholar and Feminist Online 2 (1): 1 – 4, http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline. Del Pozo, José. 2006. Exiliados, emigrados/retornados: Chilenos en América y Europa, 1973– 2004. Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores. Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2000. Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity. Oxford: Berg. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, Michael. 1999. Affective Labor. Boundary 2 26 (2): 89 – 100. Hite, Katherine. 2012. Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain. New York: Routledge. Hite, Katherine, and Cath Collins. 2009. Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Reawakenings in 21st-Century Chile. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (2). Moulian, Tomás. 1997. Chile actual: anatomía/mito. Santiago Chile: ARCIS Universidad; LOM Ediciones. 201 202 LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [Goldsmiths, University of London] at 10:36 04 February 2014 Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Shayne, Julie. 2009. They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism. Lanham: Lexington Books. Wright, Thomas, and Rody Oñate. 2004. Chilean Diaspora. In Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Immigrant and Refugee Cultures Around the World, edited by M. Ember, Carol R. Ember, and Ian Skoggard., 58– 65. New York. Carolina Ramı́rez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She completed an MA in Social Research in the same University before starting her PhD in Visual Sociology. Her main research interests are migration and diaspora studies, ’home’, memory studies, as well as ethnographic and visual methods. All these interests converge in her ongoing doctoral research about the Chilean Diaspora’s changing fields of belonging within the UK. Along with working in other academic publications, she is enaged in ’public scholarship’ by contributing to the Runnymede Trust series and by collaborating with The New Londoners Magazine. Alejandra Serpente is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. She has a chapter titled ‘The Traces of “Postmemory” in SecondGeneration Chilean and Argentinean Identities’ in the book Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), and organized a memory symposium at the University of London in November 2010. Her current research focuses on the diasporic postmemories of second-generation Chileans and Argentineans living in the UK in relation to the last military dictatorships.