A Heritage of Otherness: Memory Haunts and Urban Development on the ‘Other Side’ of Santiago de Chile

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the relationship between heritage, difference, and urban development. More specifically, I present a case study of the barrio of Patronato in Santiago de Chile and show how its heritage of otherness simultaneously situates the neighbourhood on the fringes of the city and plays into the neoliberal logic of its developmental trajectory. I argue that Patronato works as a post-dictatorial memory haunt frequented by a past that might appear missing on the surface but is in fact there, urging us to further nuance our understanding of the presences and absences of the bygone. In a broader sense, I use the example of Patronato to point to the often subtle but nonetheless significant entanglement between neighbourhood actors and the political establishment in the realm of heritage; an entanglement that, I suggest, requires further critical scrutiny.

KEYWORDS:

• Chile
• heritage
• memory haunts
• otherness
• urban development

Acknowledgements

This article has been developed on the basis of a book chapter previously published in Swedish under the title ‘Patronato på andra sidan – kulturarv i den nyliberala staden’ (Schwabe 2017). I thank the editor of that book as well as the other contributors for the input they provided then. I would also like to thank Mikkel Bille, Ida Lerche Klaaborg, and Jeremy Payne-Frank, along with the editors and anonymous reviewers, for their insights and thoughtful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All research participants have been given pseudonyms.

2 Heritage and heritage sites have come to play an increasingly large role in the Santiago cityscape in post-dictatorship—not least due to the recuperation of a number of former detention and torture centers that have now been made into sites of memory (see, e.g., Bishop 2014; Klep 2012; Meade 2001; Taylor 2011; Wyndham & Read 2014). Santiago’s wider geography of memory is beyond the scope of this article, however.

3 All interview quotations have been translated from Spanish by the author.

4 Free trade agreements were consolidated between Chile and South Korea, China, and Japan respectively in the first decade of the twenty-first century (see Alexander 2009: 15-16).

5 This is largely in line with what others have framed as the ‘entrepreneurial’ character of urban development in Chile (Casgrain 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions: [Grant Number FP7-PEOPLE-2011-ITN-289672].