Carmen Aguirre Photo: Alejandra Aguirre
Carmen Aguirre's book Something Fierce tells the story of her childhood in Chile with her parents who were part of the Chilean Resistance under Augusto Pinochet. Her family lived in exile in Canada, before returning to South America where she joined the resistance movement.
Now back living in Vancouver, Carmen Aguirre's latest book Mexican Hooker #1 tells of her confronting the trauma of her past and trying to make it as an actress, constantly offered roles as a maid or a prostitute.
She will be in Auckland next month for the Writers Festival.
LISTEN to Kathryn Ryan's interview with Carmen Aguirre.
Read an edited snapshot of their conversation below:
Were you in some ways torn between Canada and Chile? When you went back, what were your experiences as an adult?
Because we came to Canada as refugees, that’s very different to coming as an immigrant. So when somebody goes somewhere else as an immigrant, it’s all about reinventing themselves in the new country. When you’re a refugee, it’s all about the return. You don’t want to be where you are, you just want to go back to your country.
I grew up with that pull because I watched my parents go through that and the rest of the Chilean community in exile here in Vancouver and across Canada was all about the return, the return, the return, which is exactly what my mother and step-father did when I was 11 in 1979. They decided to go back and join the underground and my sister and I went with them.
My sister was 10 and I was 11 and we ended up running a safe house in Bolivia and in Argentina for Chilean resistance members going in and out of Chile during the ‘80s.
When my mother took my sister and I back, my father stayed here in Canada. They had split up by that point. So they had a deal that my sister and I would go back and forth between Canada and South America until we came of age. It was in one of those return trips to Canada that this rape happened when I was 13.
Indeed, your mother was somewhat torn. Tell us about the conversation you had, at McDonald's at LA airport of all places, and is this where she says to you, after having spent all of those years in Canada, “We’re going back to Chile”? How did she articulate that to you at that moment that seems so memorable?
She had told my sister and me that we were going to Costa Rica, so that was what my sister and I thought we were doing. Until we took the plane from Vancouver to LA and we were waiting for the connecting flight. That was when she says to us, “We’re not going to Costa Rica, that was never the plan, we’re actually going somewhere in South America, I can’t tell you where because that is top secret because we are going to join the underground”.
At that point we take a flight to Lima, Peru and there, once we take a flight to Lima, Peru, she still can’t tell us exactly where we will be living and we cross Peru by land and end up living in La Paz.
These next 10 years since that return, obviously what happens here at a political level is that you become an adult you have to begin seeing the world through your own eyes and not through the decisions being made by your parents, but you were still a young woman.
How did you begin to involve yourself in the realities of the life of a revolutionary? Was this a conscious political choice do you believe or was it something you almost grew into?
I think it’s a mix of both. It really was something that I believed in. For example my sister, we were raised exactly the same way, but she never took that route. It’s arguable to know whether or not you are born into it. Certainly not in her case, she was born into it, but chose to go in a completely different path.
When I was 18, I joined the resistance myself. It was 1986, the last few years of the Pinochet dictatorship and I really did believe that I wanted to do something because I didn’t want to later in life, when my children or grandchildren would ask me “What did you do in the Pinochet dictatorship?”, I wanted to look them in the eye and say, “This is what I did” as opposed to, “I didn’t do anything”.
