I left Chile one month after the coup and returned for a visit the first time in January of 1981, a very bad time, a very repressive time. I felt I had to come back to Chile, one, to sort of smell it. And to interview people who knew Victor before I did. I was taken to small, clandestine places that were supposed to be the local football club, or something, where there were peñas [small clubs, popular since the mid-sixties, where musicians played, usually music from the New Chilean Song movement, and where wine and empanadas were served] going on with lots of young people singing. That was one way people had of keeping things alive, keeping spirits up. It preserved a sense of identity, keeping the strings of memory alive.

I came back to stay just after my book, Victor: An Unfinished Song, was first published in London in 1983. [A Spanish version was published in Spain that year; the book was republished in the United States in 1984 under the title, An Unfinished Song: The Life of Victor Jara, by Ticknor & Fields, New York; a new edition will be published in London in September 2001]. I took a plane from Australia, where I was promoting the book, to Easter Island and on to Santiago thinking that I wasn’t going to be let in. But they did let me in. Just before Christmas of 1983. They told me that if I didn’t take part in anything political, I could stay; otherwise, out. So I was relatively careful. I didn’t want to go out, for example. I did go to funerals.

There were so many funerals. They were obvious political demonstrations. That’s what I most remember about that time. Funerals of people who were killed for this or that. And also funerals of well-known people like the actor Roberto Parada or Rodrigo Rojas [the young man who was set on fire by Pinochet's henchmen]. That was where we would meet, in the cemetery. Really. It was terrible. And of course there were songs, along the way and in the cemetery. Running from the tear gas and all that. Matilde [Pablo Neruda's widow]. That’s what I most remember.

ANGEL PARRA, Composer, Singer
[Angel Parra is part of a remarkable family. One of his uncles was a poet and a troubadour, another a union leader all his life; his uncle Nicanor Parra is a physicist and Chile’s best known poet on an international level after Neruda; his sister Isabel is a prominent singer and musician, as are his son Angel and his niece Tita. His mother, Violeta Parra, is one of Chile’s true folk heroes, a luminous musical talent as composer and lyricist who inspired many who created the New Chilean Song movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, Angel and Isabel established a small club in the house they had recently bought, where exponents of the New Chilean Song came to perform: the Peña de los Parra. People went there to listen to Victor Jara, Rolando Alarcón, Patricio Manns, Isabel, Angel, many young musicians. Later, peñas appeared in cities all over the country, all exact copies of the Peña de los Parra: low tables, carafes instead of bottles of wine, candles, with empanadas and croquettes for sale at intermission.]

continued << previous 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|next>>