A HISTORY STITCHED IN TIME — Arrested, tortured and raped before fleeing Chile, resilient Professor Cecilia Ubilla travels the world displaying hand-stitched arpilleras (tapestries) created in secrecy by women who lived through atrocities during Agusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. /Marshall Murphy/ Staff
Chile’s brutal coup d’état left blood on the hands of the American CIA and the multinational corporation but it bloodied poor Chileans.
It was the poor of Chile that suffered the brutality of the Chilean military’s ousting the democratic Popular Unity government in 1973 and the murder of President Salvador Allende. Professor Cecilia Ubilla, from Curicó, was swept up in the violence. She was thrown in jail, tortured and repeatedly raped by members of the militia before she could escape.
Dictator Augusto Pinochet, his military and the elite class of Chilean society crushed the Popular Unity movement supported by the middle class and the poor.
As Chilean democracy unraveled, women told stories of atrocities by weaving arpilleras, colorful tapestries. A common cultural bond between women, arpilleras before the coup were pieces of artistic expressions in miniature tapestries that traditionally recounted family life, social events and cultural expressions.
They grew darker during the oppressive Pinochet era, little hand-crafted works of defiance that chronicled the suffering of the Chilean people.
“Every time you see embroidery and beautiful things of all kinds of Latin America, ask if there is some pain there and if there is a hidden message about inequality,” said Ubilla.
Harassed and abused by Pinochet’s misogynistic military, Chilean women secretly gathered in churches and homes to stitch the personal stories of atrocities under the rule of a ruthless dictator.
Ubilla was abandoned by her own Pinochet-supporting family. She eventually fled Chile and has not returned.
“I have fear,” she said. “I also have a big pain that prevents me from going back because my family always supported the military. They were against me and I do not want to see them again. I have lived a lonely life, but at least I am at peace with my conscience.”
She carried with her a suitcase full of arpilleras, smuggled out of Chile through the Swiss Embassy in Santiago, to show the world the little-told history of Chilean’s poor through the eyes and hands of its women.
Chile is a democracy now, Ubilla said, and the government is stable, but she is waiting for funding to take these remaining arpilleras to the great museums of Chile, a reminder of the country’s past struggles and inhumanity.
“I will not forget and I will not forgive,” she said. “My duty and my job as a human on this planet is to denounce these atrocities.”
Ubilla and her invaluable arpilleras came to Southwestern College hosted by the School of Language and Literature. Professor of Spanish Dinorah Guadiana-Costa said the presentation by la Profesora Ubilla was like no other she had ever seen.
“I did not know anything about these arpilleras,” she said. “What a way of maintaining and telling the history of Chile!”