Second-Hand Smoke: Chilean Postmemory in Exile

Abstract

My father was one of the thousands of children displaced by Chile's 1973 coup d'etat and subsequent military dictatorship. While there exists a great body of literature on those individuals who experienced this violence and displacement as adults, little attention has been given to how their children, the Chilean diaspora's "hinge" generation, remembers and constructs their own experiences of dislocation. This thesis attends to the task of complicating existing narratives of loss and displacement in the Chilean diaspora. Through theory and through fiction, it centers the "hinge" generation to encourage a multivalent and multi-voiced approach to remembering. Three original short stories form the focal point of this thesis. Joined together by the recurrent motif of secondhand smoke, these works explore memory and trauma within the family, and the way the past intrigues, haunts, and interrupts. All three stories were informed by 16 personal interviews I conducted with members of her family and other displaced Chileans, as well as audiovisual testimonies of displaced Chileans from the archives at el Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile. As a member of the third generation, knowing that my own understanding of the past has become dissociated from earlier memories, this project also features a small collection of family photos, inviting readers to speculate on how these images can communicate on their own. 102 Shut up, please! 103 This woman 104 Of Belgium 105 Ministry of Housing 106 Get up, silly