Jennifer Ashley

What I remember is: giant screens showing the results and simultaneously showing the faces of the generals and the generals’ wives. And how they cried: how they cried and how the makeup of the generals’ wives ran down their faces. And that for me was such a strong symbol of how absolute power is crumbling in front of my very eyes. And seeing the vulnerability of the system that was the absolute oppressor, seeing them crumble with the joy of the people, with the people’s vote, with the will of the people recovering their dignity, was a contrast. It was, as they say, a very moving double screen.

I was very nervous, as it was the first choice in my life. I left the house with my dad and we were very close to vote, and we were going to vote about two blocks away and I remember that I went by the police station that was around the corner from my house. And, with my father on my arm, very nervous, we arrived at the… this was at the José Victorino Lastarria High School in Providencia […]. When I got out, wow, I was so relieved.

It is a time – the dictatorship – in general of a lot of fear, of a lot of oppression. And I felt it both in my family and in the external world when I inhabited it, when I went out on the street. Only saved, or saved to a great extent, I would tell you, by this school where I studied where, for example, they never taught me the history of Chile. I did not know what the history of Chile was, how they were indoctrinating other children here in Chile regarding the heroism, for example, of the military junta.

From the first day I already said: I arrived in Chile. This is my spot. But I have a very clear memory of the country I came to. Two things really caught my attention. On the one hand, I came from having lived in the Canary Islands in the Spain of the uncovering, from a society that liberalized culturally very quickly after Franco’s death. And arriving in Chile meant arriving at a, I’m not saying a convent of nuns but, arriving at a country culturally, not only with the weight of the dictatorship and censorship and the cultural repression of the dictatorship, but to a country very morally closed, very prudish […]. And the other thing that caught my attention was the material poverty that existed in Chile at that time.

It is not music alone: it is music and a social state that is willing to interact. What happens is very dialectical. Nothing happens alone, nothing: neither love nor hate. Everything that happens with the senses, interacts. The violence proposed by the Pinochet dictatorship, in its communication of the campaign of terror, was one thing that had society up to this point: it was exhausted of that tonality, dark, violent, imposing […]. Basically, the song was not made by me. The song made her the social mood of the moment. Perhaps that same song at the time of the Unidad Popular would have been ridiculous.