Homelands and dictators: migration, memory, and belonging between Southeastern Europe and Chile

ABSTRACT

In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’concerning past dictatorships and political violence emerged both in the Latin American Southern Cone and in Central and Eastern Europe. Both regions witnessed the creation and then consolidation of memory regimes related to remembering military dictatorships and state socialism, respectively. This article interrogates how transnational migration experiences between the two regions challenge nationally framed memory regimes, with a focus on Chile, Romania, and Croatia. By tracing individual migrants and exiles between Romania and Chile, as well as the Croatian Chilean diaspora, this article discusses the entanglements between Chile and Southeastern Europe in the remembrance of the Pinochet and Ceausescu dictatorships, as well as the Tito´s Yugoslavia. First, it shows how migrants who experienced dictatorships in both regions operate their own vernacular comparisons between the two experiences. These reframe the tropes existing in dominant memory narratives in each country and create hierarchies of suffering and oppression (i.e. in the case of the Romania–Chile comparison, with a more negative valuation of the Ceauşescu dictatorship). Second, by discussing intergenerational memory for those who did not experience dictatorship, as well as diasporic memory formations (e.g. Croat Chileans), it shows that, in these instances, comparisons are more under the influence of dominant national memory frames, but also of memory entrepreneurs who mobilize specific threads. Moreover, the article discusses how these various migrant experiences constitute and reframe senses of belonging, interrogating both the formulations of home and transnationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• migration
• dictatorship
• belonging
• comparison

Introduction

Valliant songs and brightly coloured flags were defying the grey clouds of the September Santiago skies. On 11 September almost every year for a decade now, Chilean cities witness eruptions of police violence responding to irruptions of memory (Wilde 1999), which include marches and protests marking the memory of the 1973 Coup d’état, when elected president Salvador Allende was overthrown by the military. On 11 September 2017, together with Fernando and his sister, both exiled to Romania during the Pinochet dictatorship, I was in the Cementerio General of Santiago. This was the location of the usual climax of the commemoration, featuring impassioned speeches, followed by the eventual mass tear gassing by Chile´s carabineros. We had just walked for miles on Santiago´s avenues, with the city street cleaners swiping everything just behind us. There would be no disorder, and no remains of the marches: under the command of the local authorities, the presence in urban space of this memory procession was efficiently erased. Fernando joked that this was the role of the state in Chile anyway, to always obstruct memory. In the cemetery, the police was still at bay. Fernando cautioned me that they would start their operation of breaking the assembly soon and violence would probably occur. It became somehow of a ritual of police violence, a memory of yearly occurrences at an event about memory. Two rituals of memory and silencing, one after the other. At the sight of a young man holding the rainbow flag next to a red one with a hammer and sickle, Fernando turned again to me and said ‘How foolish they can be! They know so little! These young communists today have no clue that under the hammer and sickle flag, gay people were put in prison in Romania and beyond!’. He paused, and said ‘I would ban these symbols today!’.

Fernando attends the marches every year and works on urban projects for the disadvantaged members of the community in one of Santiago´s most deprived neighbourhoods. He grew up in a socialist-leaning family in Santiago. But he departs from most of his left-leaning peers in Chile in his relationship to socialism due to his memories of a decade spent in exile in communist Romania in the 1980s. The Chilean left today operates within a memory regime focusing on the human rights abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship, portrayed as brutal and distinctive, while idealizing the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Fernando, however, uses comparison to his experience in Romania to complicate and challenge the memory canon. As it emerged from our interactions, his memories of that decade are at the heart of Fernando´s representations of Chile´s past and present.

Both Chile and Romania experienced dictatorships that ended around 1989. In the last three decades, a ‘memory fever’ (Jelin 2002) concerning past dictatorships and political violence emerged both in the Latin American Southern Cone and in Central and Eastern Europe. Both regions witnessed the creation and then consolidation of memory regimes related to remembering military dictatorships and state socialism respectively. According to Bernhard and Kubik (2014), memory regimes are the set of cultural and institutional practices through which a particular event or period is remembered. Memory regimes include a constellation of at times competing memory threads, master narratives, taboos as they are reflected in a society at a particular time (Langenbacher 2003). In post-dictatorial and post-conflict societies, memory regimes are often fractured between different visions of the past, mobilized by different actors (Kubik and Bernhard 2014). Different memory frames (Zarecka 1994), corresponding to social groups attached to particular narratives, often coexist and compete in such societies, shaping at times memory canons. What perspectives do we get, however, if we look at an important focus of memory regimes in post-dictatorial societies – the dictatorship itself – from the perspective of migrants? The central question of this article is how memories of individuals and groups who experienced transnational migration challenge such existing memory regimes and memory frames in societies dealing with an authoritarian past.

The article examines how experiences of transnational migration impact the memory of dictatorship. Conversely, it explores how life under a dictatorship relates to the shaping of senses of belonging in transnational migration. It interrogates to what extent memory regimes of remembering dictatorships are challenged be the experience of migration, either in situations of direct witnessing, or in intergenerational and diasporic transmission of memories.The first dimension of this inquiry is to examine how experiences of having lived in an authoritarian regime reframe the memory and perceptions of another authoritarian regime. Fernando´s experience, as of other exiles from Chile to Central and Eastern Europe, or, conversely, migrants from Soviet Block countries to Chile reflect this situation. The focus here is on what Rubin (1999) called autobiographical memory, on how individuals make sense of their experience. As Assmann and Conrad (2010, 2) put it, ‘memories migrate from one continent to another with individuals’. As such, the focus of this study is on how individual trajectories and idiosyncratic destinies help us understand the entangled nature of memory beyond the spatially bound (national) collective memory. In this case of a double experience of authoritarian regimes, the article shows how people make vernacular comparisons¹ between memories of dictatorships, which reframe the tropes existing in dominant memory narratives in each country.

A second dimension is to examine socially mediated forms of memory, which do not refer to direct experience, but to socially transmitted tropes. Even the autobiographical, individual memory is embedded in different social relations and experiences of groups (ie. exiles from Chile or Romania; immigrants); as Halbwachs (1992) argued, all memory is social. However, at the level of society, a ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs 1992) is shaped through shared memory frames. Jan Assmann (2011) distinguished between a communicative memory -̶ a vernacular memory conveyed through the work of generations -̶ and a cultural memory embedded in artefacts, museums, textbooks and where elites play a role in shaping what is remembered and what is forgotten. Societies feature such cultural and communicative memory, including specific memory regimes of remembering periods and events (e.g. dictatorships). With regard to migration experiences, between family members who experienced migration, recollected experiences are transmitted as intergenerational, communicative memory. In diasporic situations, including a larger group, consolidated in time, both communicative and cultural memory are pillars of diasporic identities. In Chile for instance, a prominent diasporic group is the Croatian Chileans, result of nineteenth-century migration from Dalmatia. They experienced Chile´s Pinochet dictatorship but not Tito´s Yugoslavia. The question here is how intergenerational communicative and diasporic memory interact with wider societal memory regimes. Through a discussion of perceptions of East European migrants to Chile who do not have direct significant memories of dictatorship, as well as of perceptions from the long-established Croatian Chilean diaspora, the article shows the prevalence of dominant societal memory frames. As such, it analyses how different migration experiences -an established diaspora versus individual migration and political exile- relate to the dominant memory frames in a society.

Third, the article also muses how the experience of dictatorship has an impact on the memory of migration, and the understanding of home and belonging of such migrants. Through an analysis of accounts of people who experienced such migrations between dictatorships, or who receive through intergenerational and diasporic transmission accounts of life in a dictatorship, the article explores the shaping of senses of belonging, interrogating both the formulations of home and transnationality.

With regard to regional memory regimes, the article examines the role of Southeast European experiences in reframing memory threads in the Southern Cone, as well as the other way around. One lens is the experience of people moving between two Cold War camps. While much of this migration was understood as refuge and exile based on a view of the two camps as ideologically opposed and rigid, this article points out that even in a time of rigid borders and camps, flows in between camps show a higher degree of transnationality and ‘allegiances’ are more complicated. Moreover, it connects two so-called peripheries. It departs from the usual focus on East European exile in Western Europe or North America – embodying the capitalist/liberal/democratic aspirations of those who fled, and connects to the research on Chilean exile in countries of both ideological camps. By tracing individual migrants and exiles between Romania and Chile, as well as the Croatian Chilean diaspora, this article shows entanglements between Chile and Southeastern Europe in the remembrance of the Pinochet and Ceausescu dictatorships, as well as the Tito´s Yugoslavia.

The study of traveling memories often focuses on practices of cultural memory (Crownshaw 2011; Erll 2011), including the analysis of circulations of memory forms between Southeastern Europe and South America such as practices of site memorialization (Badescu 2019). In contrast, this article focuses on individual accounts and storytelling that complicate both ‘thinking with groups’ (Brubaker 2004) as well as notions of collective memory. The article first introduces themes in the contemporary theories of memory and migration, and discusses the methodology of this endeavour. It then introduces the dominant memory threads concerning dictatorship in both Southeastern Europe and Chile, as well as the different profiles of migrant and diasporic communities. In a second part, it gives voice to a number of interlocutors who shared their stories. It then reflects on how these accounts highlight both the spatial dimension of home and the memory thread of dictatorship, reflecting how they depart from the mainstream memory regimes.

On memory and migration

A plethora of scholarly work has addressed memory in the interconnected world of today, or how Assmann and Conrad (2010, 2) put it, ‘memory in a global age’, when ‘memory has entered the global stage and global discourse’. The analysis of circulations of memory has been generally connected to a global Holocaust remembrance regime (Levy and Sznaider 2006). Yet memory has become transnational, transcultural, multidirectional, traveling (Rothberg 2009; Crownshaw 2011; Erll 2011; De Cesari and Rigney 2014).

Concomitantly, migration and mobility have received significant attention. Beyond the classical understandings of diaspora and exile, new forms of migrant experiences have taken the spotlight. Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992, xix) characterized in a seminal article migrant transnationalism as ‘forging and sustaining multi-stranded social relations that linked their societies of origin and settlement; … a social process in which migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders’. For them, the central element of transnationalism is the multiplicity of involvements that migrants have in both home and host societies.

Work on migration has challenged the „container“ view on states, showing a complex global movement of mobility that has accentuated since the nineteenth century, creating opportunities but also new forms of stratification, cultural contact, acculturation, and new senses of belonging (Hoerder 2014). Research on how migrants understand their belonging highlighted an internal- external dialectic (Madsen and Van Naerssen 2003; Benhabib 1999), in that while individual migrants may feel at home in a particular location, their sense of belonging is also affected by the recognition of others as legitimate (Valentine, Sporton, and Nielsen 2009). According to Rishbeth and Powell (2013), the memory of the place of origin is not only a display of nostalgia, but also a form of creative process that mediates between the local and the transnational scales.

According to Creet (2011, 9–10), migration is conducive to the condition of memory, as ‘displacement intensifies our investments in memory’. Nevertheless, memories of migrants often lack from the discussion of what Halbwachs (1992) defined as collective memory. As Glynn and Olaf Kleist (2012) pointed out, from Pierre Nora (1997)´s Lieux de mémoire to the editors of the German Erinnerungsorte volume (Francois and Schulze 2003), most work on collective memory did not engage with the memory of migrants, seen as marginal to national memory cultures. For Jan Assmann (1992), migrant memories are not usually included in the existing cultural memory, conceptually becoming ‘countermemories’, usually marked by suppression, marginalization and alterity. Yet newer studies explored the intersection between the study of memory and that of migration. As Glynn and Olaf Kleist (2012) underlined, memories are used to negotiate belonging in migrant-receiving societies. For instance, Ram and Yacobi (2012) examined how memory debates in Israel were used to reframe or exclude African asylum seekers from a possible Israeli identity. Tony Kushner et al (2006)showed how in Britain the memory of receiving refugees was employed to support the admission of some and the rejection of others. Neumann and Tavan (2009) similarly showed how selective memory of past migration to Australia informed national asylum policy. The edited volume by Palmberger and Tošić (2017) examined through a series of contributions from anthropology the mutual constitution of remembering, migration and movement. This present article contributes to this literature by discussing the specific situation of the memory of migration between dictatorships.

Frames of memory and migration in Southeastern Europe and Cono Sur

While far removed in geographic terms and with distinctive historical experiences, the Southern Cone and Southeastern Europe share a number of similarities in the way their memory regimes are articulated. First, official memory frames were slow to be shaped, with more bottom-up forces being instrumental in the first decades after dictatorship,and state actors getting involved later, when supportive governments came to power(Collins 2012; Stan and Nedelsky 2015). Second, a dual system of memory frames coexists, including one trope of condemnation of dictatorship, existing both in the southern Cone and Southeastern Europe; vs. another of remembering the military dictatorship or socialist regimes as beneficial times of development, mobilized by the right in Chile and important segments of society in Central and Eastern Europe. Third, circulations of practices connected the two regions. For instance, in Chile on the one hand and Romania and the former Yugoslavia on the other have seen circulations of memory and justice practices between regions (Grosescu, Baby, and Neumayer 2019; Badescu 2019).

As other countries in the Cono Sur, Chile experienced a military dictatorship. In Chile, this lasted between 1973 and 1990, following the coup d´État which removed the elected president Salvador Allende. The transformative three-year experiment of democratic socialism under Allende (1970–1973) featured extensive reforms, but also unrest and contestation both from the right and the more radical left. After the coup, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet led a campaign of torture and persecution of those seen as socialists, in a Cold War-framed narrative of defense against global communism. Thousands fled Chile in political exile, reaching also Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Wright and Rody 1998). Chileans voted in a plebiscite to remove Pinochet from power in 1988 and the memory of the dictatorship abuses increasingly featured in the societal debates of the transition that followed. This was opposed by the right, who focused on the country´s economic development under Pinochet (Collins, Hite, and Joignant 2013). Chile today is country of divided, competitive memory cultures, largely polarised between a left-wing and a right-wing reading of both the Allende and Pinochet governments, corresponding to two memory regimes, one of active remembrance and one of dismissal and refocusing on the instability of the Allende years. In the public sphere, ‘memoria’ is largely connected to the first, that is to the work to bring the crimes of the Pinochet regime to light, to justice and human rights, to the reports of dictatorship crimes and the quest against impunity (Collins 2009, 2010). This includes commemorative acts of this period, including on important dates such as September 11^th, the shaping of sites of memory in places where detention and torture happened, and the opening of Santiago´s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, dedicated to the Pinochet dictatorship (Lazzara 2006; Collins, Hite, and Joignant 2013; Andermann and Aguilera 2015).

On the other side of the Cold War, memory after 1989 originally concentrated on the persecution of political opponents, the activities of the secret police and the shortages of the last decade of communism. Nevertheless, with the difficult transition and the emergence of important inequalities, a more positive view of the communist era emerged in parts of society (M. H. Bernhard and Kubik 2014). In Southeastern Europe, both Romania and Yugoslavia stood apart in both their experiences of socialism and their memory regimes after its demise. Romania´s rule by Nicolae Ceausescu was seen as among the harshest in the Soviet Bloc (Tismaneanu 2003), and ended through a violent overthrow in December 1989. The memory of the ‘December revolution’ was a dominant thread in official remembrance after 1989, while the political persecutions from particularly the first decade of the regime were met with impunity because of statutory limitations (Grosescu and Ursachi 2009; Ciobanu 2020). Initiatives to memorialize communist crimes were first a civil society pursuit (Stan 2012), but they were officialised with the creation of a specific institute (IICMER) and the 2006 Presidential Report condemning communism (Tismaneanu and Stan 2018). Critical voices argue that anti-communism has become in the meantime such a potent discourse that has blocked any form of emancipatory politics (Chelcea and Druță 2016) and that it is mobilized in a competitive framework against the memory of the Holocaust (Shafir 2016). Nevertheless, others underline that Romania has not still worked enough with the legacy of communism and that significant continuities remain (Stan 2012; Ciobanu 2020). Discussions of how generations that have not experienced communism relate to this memory regime reveal multiple trends. Parts of youth tend to construct a more positive view of it due to aspects such as full employment, in contrast with the deprivations of their contemporary situation (Marin 2021). Others who experience educational practices like visits to memory museums such as the Sighet Memorial of Victims of Communism and Resistance express forms of empathy, revealing the affective nature of such memory transmission (Crețan et al. 2019; Light, Creţan, and Dunca 2021). Finally, intergenerational transmission of (communicative) memory call into question the official discourse, or lack thereof, as in the case of memories of displacement and place-destruction that challenge official narratives of impressive technological and architectural achievements (Duijzings 2018; Vãran and 2018).

Yugoslavia and its successor states were even more an outlier of (post)socialist Europe. First, Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito was removed from the Cominform by Stalin – the so-called Tito-Stalin split of 1948. This led to a separate path, featuring independence from the Soviet bloc and international prestige through the embracing of non-alignment, experiments in economic self-management, and freedom of travel, while ruled by one party, the League of Communism. Occasionally, collaborations with other socialist countries did occur, as for instance the joint project with Romania of the Iron Gates hydroelectric dam, used by both countries also a symbol of energetic independence from both the Soviets and the West (Creţan and Vesalon 2017). Second, the end of socialism in Yugoslavia occurred by way of dissolution through a series of wars. Memory debates in the successor states have been largely focused on the recent wars (Subotic 2009; Moll 2013; Pavlaković and Davor 2019; Fridman 2016), as well as to the Second World War beyond the official memory of Partisan heroism during socialist Yugoslavia (Đureinović 2020; Ramet 2013). Nevertheless, the memory of socialism also irrupted, largely as a confrontation between a vernacular positive memory of socialism and a negative depiction by right wing parties (Petrovic 2010; Petrović 2016). Discussing Tito under the framework of communist crimes became a trope of the right-wing parties in successor states, echoing the other Central and Eastern European countries from which socialist Yugoslavia tried so much to distinguish. The discourse of communist crimes focused both on the Second World War and on the early years of Tito´s Yugoslavia, and was both modelled on and became competitive with the memory of the Holocaust (David 2013; Subotić 2019). Gradually, the anti-socialist narrative got closer to the wider Central- Eastern European- mobilized two totalitarianism paradigm seeing fascism and communism as twin evils of the twentieth century, thus performing a Europeanisation of the idiosyncratic memory culture of ex-Yugoslavia (Milosević and Trost 2020).

While their experiences of the twentieth century and the memory regimes configurated are diverse, the three countries are not only connected by the common memory tropes of state authoritarianism., but also by migration. During the Cold War, while socialist Romania took in Chilean refugees, Chile has witnessed the migration of a small group of Romanians. One of the most important migrant groups of the 19^th century in Chile hailed from the Islands and the coast of Dalmatia, accounting to a strong Croatian diaspora today in the country´s South, as well as in the province of Antofagasta (Martinic 1999; Bustamante Flores, and Vega Igor 2013). While most did not have any direct experience of Southeastern Europe, many of them did experience Pinochet´s dictatorship and have heard of Tito´s rule in Yugoslavia, a distant reality to most. In contrast with the Croat diasporas formed after 1945, often connected to a politics hostile to Tito (Ragazzi 2009; Tokić 2009; Židek 2019b), Chile harboured a diaspora that not only did not have a direct experience of the Second World War nor communism altogether, but shaped its understanding of Croatia and Yugoslavia through indirect channels. In post-socialist Croatia, political actors on the right have proceeded to reshape the memory of Tito using the trope of authoritarianism and even dictatorship, thus echoing memory regimes of Central and Eastern European countries such as Romania. But to what extent such politics of memory had an impact in a diaspora with rather loose connections to Croatia? Chile thus offers the opportunity of not only examining how the direct experience of socialism in a Southeastern European country like Romania is being remembered and recontextualized in another post-dictatorial society, but also how memory and migration shape understandings of a rather different socialist experience, that of Yugoslavia, which was not directly experienced.

Methodology

This article is the result of fieldwork conducted in Chile (Santiago, Copiapó, La Serena, Punta Arenas, Porvenir), Romania (Bucharest, Pitești) and Croatia (Brač Island, Goli Otok, Rijeka, Zagreb) in 2017 and 2018. For the analysis of the cultural memory of dictatorship, aside from engaging with the rich existing literature, I examined sites of memory and museums in the above locations (and beyond),² where I also interviewed curators, architects, and employees of NGOs and institutions working with memory topics.³ Moreover, I visited the Island of Brač, where many of the Chilean Croatian diaspora trace their origin, and where a number of sites are visited by Chileans as sites connected to the original migration. The material specifically examined in this article comes mostly from semi-structured interviews. I interviewed 32 people who have migrated to Chile from Romania and the former Yugoslavia, as well as returned Chilean exiles from Romania- I use the in-group self-definition as ‘exiles’ (exiliados), which is not mirrored by the SE European migrants. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, Romanian, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, depending on the language with which the interlocutor was most comfortable, featuring occasional shifts between languages. Moreover, I employed participant observation and engaged in everyday activities and conversations in the Romanian communities of Copiapó and Santiago, as well as the Croat Chilean communities of Punta Arenas and Porvenir.

My positionality as a Romanian researcher who lived in a number of former Yugoslav contexts and also speaks Spanish helped with the entrance in the different communities, where through snowballing techniques I arrived at a number of my interlocutors. Nevertheless, while this positionality provided benefits, it also created challenges particularly in Romanian communities where gaining trust is also an issue, as research on sensitive questions related to Cold War experiences can be also connected with fears of past and present secret police that my interlocutors did mention.

Migration communities: memory and belonging

Acknowledgment and absence

The migrant communities discussed – Chilean exiles in Romania, Romanians in Chile, the Croat Chilean diaspora – have different levels of visibility in their host countries. In Chile, the Croatian diaspora is well acknowledged – ‘in Punta Arenas they are all Croats’ said several of my Chilean interlocutors. From the richest man in Chile, Andronico Luksić, to one of the country´s most radical politicians, Gabriel Borić, the Croat Chileans are a well recognized group. In contrast, little is known about the Romanians, or any other group from Southeastern Europe, due to limited numbers and relatively late arrival. Similarly, the Chilean presence in Southeastern Europe is negligible today. Nevertheless, during the Cold War, socialist countries, most notably the German Democratic Republic and Romania, received many Chilean exiles. Moreover, as Romania was the only country in the socialist bloc, which did not end relations with Chile when Pinochet took power, the Chilean embassy was open in Bucharest. This led to the city being a meeting point of many Chileans exiled in socialist countries who would come to Romania to renew their passport. As such, Bucharest became a hub for the Chilean exile community in Eastern Europe. Yet today there are few Chileans remaining- those who went to exile in socialist countries largely returned to Chile after the return to democracy in 1990.

The presence of a comparatively significant community of Chilean exile in Romania is largely relegated to forgetting, as most of the relations of the country with the Global South during socialism. In Bucharest, the awareness of a Chilean presence is limited to a localized knowledge in the neighborhood of Drumul Taberei, where most Chileans were housed. Moreover, some media accounts reported of ‘the Chilean blocks’ by portraying them as an exotic oddity, depoliticized from the context of the Chilean dictatorship and socialist solidarity (Serban 2016). In fact, in both Chile and Romania, the existence of the other is extirpated from the national memory. The only migrant group that features in national memory are the Croat Chileans, yet the sole memory attached to them is that of migration itself, without reference to local memory frames.

A homeland, far away: Croat Chileans

In the Tierra del Fuego, one of the world´s most southern inhabited territories, lies the small town of Porvenir (in Spanish, ‘Future’). Here, locals speak with pride that they trace their roots to Croatia, with their ancestors having arrived from Dalmatian Islands more than a century ago. Nevenka is one of the most recent arrivals, born in Yugoslavia, and the last Croatian speaker of the town. Originally from a small village next to Split, her face was lit up when she heard me speak BCS to her. In a mixture of a Dalmatian ikavica-dialect and Chilean Spanish, she recalled how an affluent Croatian Chilean couple came to Split in the early 1960s and took her with them, as they wanted a young woman speaking Croatian to take care of the kids and of the house in Porvenir. Yet, Nevenka decries, no one speaks Croatian in the town today aside from her. Her own granddaughter knows only a few words. ‘They are so proud of their Croatian heritage, but they do not show any interest in the language’. Language is what connects her to her homeland, as she reveals no interest in contemporary politics, in Yugoslavia´s breakup, nor in contested memories of Tito or the Second World War.

Nevenka´s words echo the depiction that many Croat Chileans gave me of their relationship with what they refer as their homeland- Croatia. A strong identitarian marker, they see the migration of their forefathers from the Dalmatian coast as a key element of their group memory. However, their knowledge of Croatia, Yugoslavia, or Tito is skeletal. Generations removed from the act of migration, they lack the mnemonic frames that Croats in Argentina share, many of them having arrived after 1945 in what they saw as an escape from Tito´s communism. Argentine Croats engage in mnemonic practices of criminalization of communism, alterization of Serbs, and exalting the Independent State of Croatia with its Ustasha fascist movement, narrated as one of true patriots (Židek 2019a, 2019b). With the exception of a few active figures of the Croatian Cultural Center in Punta Arenas, and a small number of migrants from the aftermath of the Second World War, the relationship with this memory is largely absent for the Croats of Southern Chile.

A depoliticized sense of Croatianness has become, however, part of the cultural memory in the region of Magallanes: a Barrio Croata in Punta Arenas, the largest city, a monument in the center dedicated to the Croatian Island of Brač, a Croatian club and Croatian restaurants- serving deceptively Chilean fare. The display in the museum of Punta Arenas, the region´s capital focuses, however, on the Spanish and English explorers that arrived here and took the territories from the indigenous. Barely mentioned in the museum´s depiction of history through elites, the migration from Dalmatia accounted for the strengthening of numbers of the working classes, but also of the labour movement that the Croats ignited, being intimately related to the first labour unions of Punta Arenas (Martinic 1999). Yet the communicative memory of the communities focuses on the Croatian-Chilote mix, with a significant part of the population in the Magallanes region tracing their roots both to Dalmatia and to Chiloe, an Island off the coast of Chile. While Chiloe is comparatively accessible and a familiar landscape, the descendants of Croats in both Porvenir and Punta Arenas relate to their Croatian heritage through practices such as baking presuratas (pršurate), seen as a Croatian product par excellence. Cultural memory and heritage package as Croatian artefacts and practices that in Southeastern Europe would be differently marked: for instance, the local song of Croat Chileans in Magallanes is ‘Tamo daleko’ (there, far away), which in the former Yugoslavia is regarded as a Serbian song stemming from the First World War, and not a song about longing for a homeland after migration.

The universal usage of the Croatian label is, however, relatively new. Arrived from nineteenth century Dalmatia, located then in Austria-Hungary, many migrants were defined as austriacos by the Chileans. After 1918, they became yugoslavos, and now croatas. The so-called Croatian neighborhood of Punta Arenas, the barrio croata in Punta Arenas, was similarly originally the barrio austriaco and then the barrio yugoslavo. Local historians point out that the community was enthusiastic about the creation of a state of South Slavs after the First World War, and kept their allegiance all throughout the twentieth century (Martinić Beros 2014). During the Second World War, the council of local Croats denounced with fervor the Ustasha regime ran by Ante Pavelić and pronounced their allegiance to Yugoslavia and the Karađorđević dynasty: ‘we repudiate the criminal and cowardly attitude of the national traitors Ante Pavelić and henchmen’ (Martinić Beros 2014) Nevertheless, a different association, the Dalmatian Club rejoiced the new independence of Croatia and the alliance with the Axis, while not endorsing Pavelić´s actions. Yet the majority of Magallanes Croats remained Yugoslavists. In April 1944, the Croat Council declared their adhesion to the National Liberation Committee led by ‘brilliant’ Josip Broz Tito. Respected local intellectual Lucas Bonačić-Dorić applauded the federal structure of Yugoslavia, as it gave Croatia its own rule. As Martinić Beros(2014) argues, the Croat Chileans had little knowledge of Bleiburg, the killing of soldiers and civilian supporters of the Ustasha, which had such traction for other Croatian diasporic groups to build the image of a criminal Tito.

In 1991, however, the board of directors of the Dalmatian Mutual Aid Society, became an ad hoc committee to support the Croatian independence movement (Martinić Beros 2014). While the committee praised the general feelings of affection for the homeland of the Croat Chileans, it argued that it was important to ‘promote an opinion movement aimed at enlightening those who are ignorant or are insufficiently or wrongly informed about the historical and legal foundations that sustain Croatian national aspirations’. Part of this project was the reframing of the name ‘Yugoslav’ as a symbol of oppression and injustice, aimed for ‘disgraceful oblivion’ (Martinić Beros, 2014). The change in the self-identification worked, with ‘Yugoslav’ being less used today. Nevertheless, it does occur. For instance, one interlocutor quickly corrected himself when he said that his grandfather was from Yugoslavia, quickly adding ‘err, Croatia’- Yugoslavia is seen as an inertial reference. Moreover, the dissemination of news about the Yugoslav wars in a country with a sizable Croatian diaspora led to a particular framing of the wars. For instance, an interlocutor in Santiago of Serbian origin, recalled that while her Croat Chilean dentist treated her with a positive outlook, the secretary, finding out after inquiring about the origin of the patient´s name that she was Serbian, stated bluntly ‘Ah, here in Chile we side with the Croats, not the Serbs’.

In their accounts of socialist Yugoslavia, the term dictatorship occurs at times. One man who arrived in Chile as a 15 year old described Yugoslavia as a ‘dictatorship which lasted 50 years’ (Bustamante Flores, and Vega Igor 20132013, 73). But the reference to dictatorship is mostly used when describing the events in Chile. With regard to the Pinochet dictatorship, some keep the long history of the workers´ movement and decry the military dictatorship, while others praise it for the ‘order and development’ it brought. For the Croatian diaspora, without regard to the position that each individual has, it is the memory of the Chilean dictatorship that is the key lieu de memoire. Despite their repertoire of images of the homeland, so typical for diasporas, their memory frames are Chilean.

Romanians of Copiapó

While the presence of Romanian migrants was also documented since the early days of the Chilean state, the beginnings of a Romanian community in Chile are usually connected to Salvador Allende. In 1970, as part of the opening of the Chilean state to the Eastern bloc, Allende signed an agreement with the Romanian state for the creation of a joint Romanian-Chilean mining company to capitalize on the technical expertise that Romania had in mining. The city of Copiapó in the South of the Atacama desert received a number of Romanian engineers and their families. After the coup of 1973, several decided to stay. In 1980, the Chilean state privatized the 50% of the company that it owned, as part of the wave of privatizations under Pinochet. After 1990, another wave of Romanian geologists, particularly from Transylvania, arrived. As one declared, ‘the American dream can be achieved in Chile’.⁴

Members of the small Romanian community of Copiapó see themselves as integrated today. Some see Chile as a place of adventure, others as a place of making money for a better life in Romania, but they shared with me a desire to return and retire in Romania. For several of my interlocutors, the connection with Chile and even the emergence of a ‘new love’ came through listening to people, getting immersed in the everyday, getting know the Chilean way through slow socialization.

In one conversation with multiple members of the community, one of the younger Romanian men who came to Copiapó in 2010 mentioned that Chile went through a very difficult dictatorship. Another, older man counteracted and said Romania´s was ‘harder’, as he could attest from his experience. The younger man pointed that he does not know so much about the communist period in Romania, but that in Chile everyone talks about hard it was. Moreover, there is so much commemoration, which he did not see in Romania. His remarks echo the study by Iacob and Tismăneanu, (2015) that many Romanians underestimate the scope of crimes during the dictatorship. But, more importantly, they show the friction between generations: while one invokes lived experience, the other is based on the frames of memory regimes he was familiar with: one of engagement with memory in Chile, and a lack of dealing with the past in Romania. In this case, the importance in Chile of the memory of the dictatorship shaped his understanding of what in the other Romanians´ accounts becomes a hierarchization of memory. Yet to unpack how this hierarchy of memory is shaped, we shall now turn to accounts of autobiographical memory.

Cold war migration stories

Mihaela

Mihaela is a medical professional in a city in central Chile. Her family hails from Transylvania, where they ‘lost their agricultural land’ during the collectivization period in the 1950s, the first decade of communist rule in Romania. While her uncle became a writer who occasionally wrote hidden critiques of the communist regime, her father, who studied geology in Cluj, became a Communist Party member. He was therefore allowed to travel to Chile as one of the geologists employed by the Chilean- Romanian joint company created by Allende. He took his wife and two daughters to Santiago. Mihaela was 10 when she arrived to Chile, after spending her childhood in a small Transylvanian town. In Santiago, they lived in Providencia, the neighbourhood of affluent Chileans. ‘My city stopped at Plaza Italia’, she said, thus echoing the mental geography of most affluent residents of Santiago, who have rarely ventured East of the square, living in the manicured ‘barrio altos’ of Santiago, one of Latin America´s most segregated cities.

As the Romanian state did not allow them to go to private schools, she went to a public school. Yet, as she comments, the quality of public schools in Chile was ‘then still good’. After the coup of 1973, despite being from a communist country, she mentions she did not feel pursued or followed. Only after 1990, Mihaela recalls a professor at the University of Chile stating in a disdainful way that he would not recognize diplomas from a university from a socialist country.

In 1979, her father was called back to Romania and the whole family had to return. The young women said good bye to their friends, and to their boyfriends. Mihaela described the pain and the anger that her father did not let them stay in her ‘beloved Chile’, and the feeling of irreversibility. Reminiscing her dread of Romania´s closed borders, she said ‘We left, knowing that from Romania, one could never return’. From the 1980s in Romania, Mihaela recalls the pervasive feeling of being watched, her letters being read by the Secret Police and the rigidity of the system. Moreover, she highlighted the deterioration of living conditions and the absence of heating and food in the late 1980s.

After the 1989 Revolution, her first thought was to return to Chile. She convinced her husband to join with their baby daughter. She describes how she was crying tears of joy at the airport in Bucharest, when she saw three young Chileans also saying goodbye. They might have been in Romania from exiled parents, she adds. One was embracing his Romanian girlfriend. They were also crying. In her recollection, she saw them as tears of tremendous sadness and loss. They met again in Frankfurt airport and she spotted tears again. ‘I was so happy to go to my country, Chile, he was so sad to leave his country, Romania’.

Her husband found a job in a city in central Chile, where her father knew people. Yet Mihaela´s Chile was Santiago, which she had to abandon for this new city. Santiago, in any case, changed in the decade she was absent, both architecturally (‘all these new towers’) and socially (‘people seemed to have become go-getters’). After a year, her husband decided to come back to Romania (‘he could not just fit in’), and she remained with her daughter and her new Chilean partner, with whom she also has a son.

Mihaela was disappointed by her return: she thought she belonged in Chile, yet every time she was reminded that she was not Chilean. She recalls that when makes a phone call, she is still asked where she hails from or what kind of accent she has. As a medical practitioner, she is asked where she studied. Having obtained a diploma from the University of Santiago, she mentions that, not referring to her first degree in Bucharest. ‘I have to do everything 10 times better than a local doctor’ she says. ‘I had to fight, but I made it’. She talks about how hard it was, how much she had to work, but she persevered, she graduated from classes that validated her diploma and she built a successful practice. She says she feels more Chilean than Romanian. As such, Mihaela echoes the usual tropes of migrants who evoke their difficulties in being accepted and being professionally integrated, but witnessing a personal sense of belonging. Yet while she feels she belongs to the space and the country, she feels somehow rejected by its people.

As opposed to the transnational migrants living in between, circulating and negotiating different societies and senses of belongings, Mihaela expresses a different dimension of migration, seeking stability and definitive belonging. Akin to earlier migration processes to the New World where far away homelands remained obscured and processes of integration were a goal, Mihaela has sought to be fully immersed in her host society and avoided both visiting and inquiring about Romania. She confesses she is afraid of returning there, for the reason that she fears she would feel that she belongs there, which would unsettle all her existence. For her, transnational mobility, and even my existence as a mobile researcher, always between countries and experiences, are achievable, but only by newer generations, which she sees as differently positioned in a more mobile world.

For Mihaela, Chile has been the country of the future, invoking familiar tropes about the forward looking New World: ‘Europe is in decline; here everything is about the future’. Yet she acknowledges that this is also a country obsessed with the concept of memory, which she refers to as the Spanish memoria, as a particularly Chilean concept, in a discussion held in Romanian. ‘Here they complain every day about the dictatorship. They are obsessed with it. But they do not really know what a dictatorship like the one in Romania was which was really tough. I lived in both places, in Romania it was really a dictatorship’. Her partner is a Chilean socialist, raised in a poor neighborhood of Santiago, always voting for the left. ‘But he understands what I mean when I share my memories [Ro. amintiri] ‘. Yet she criticizes the divided politics in Chile, and also the ossified views of society: ‘The left here is very vindictive. People who agree with the right hire anyone, including leftists. But a leftist does not hire anyone who is seen as a rightist’.

‘Here they speak about it all the time. And on 11 September, young people, who have no actual memory of this, they destroy the land, the devastate everything to show how much they are affected’. Mihaela contrasts her own recollection of events with the memory of a dictatorship that newer generations mobilize in their political action. For her, the lived experience is a warrant of the truth. In contrast, she sees the culture of memory in Chile as an engine of ritualized perpetual mourning which consumes the country with a constructed past.

Judith

As Mihaela, Judith is also a woman born in Transylvania who now lives in Chile. Yet hers is a different trajectory. Judith grew up in a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family in a small village in Transylvania´s South. As Socialist Romania made a deal with Israel to allow Jews to emigrate (as it later did with Germany for the Transylvanian Saxons and the Banat Swabians), her father decided to emigrate. Just after high school, Judith decided to join. She recalled it was not because of any Zionist ideal, but she just wanted to escape was she saw as a very restrictive system under Ceausescu´s rule. In Israel, she fell in love with a Chilean Jew, who came animated by a desire to build Israel. Yet after a few years, his longing for Chile (‘and his mother´s cooking’) was so intense, that the two left to Chile to start a new life. Arrived in Santiago, Judith realized that she went back into a dictatorship. ‘Israel was a brief respite of freedom between two authoritarian states’ she recalled. Yet, as she now evaluates ‘Chile´s dictatorship was, however, so much milder’. ‘In Chile, I never felt watched, like I did in Romania’. She commented that in Chile, only if you were a troublemaker, you would be pursued by the police. Judith returned to see her family in Romania several times and also witnessed the deterioration in living conditions. She recalls that in the 1970s Romanian stores were well stocked, but by the end of the 1980s, there was nothing to buy. In today´s Chile, she decries how younger generations are so enthusiastic about communism without knowing anything about life in the socialist block or Cuba and Venezuela today. Therefore, despite her different trajectory, Judith shares with Mihaela the ‘evaluation’ of dictatorships.

In Chile, Judith has been seen as either Romanian or Jewish, and her native language being Hungarian often confounded people not used to Central Europe´s long history of linguistic and religious diversity (and often adversity). Her children describe themselves as half-Romanian, but also Jewish, and definitely Chilean. Judith´s recollection of her trajectory is however circumscribed to the memory cultures of Romania, as well as of minority groups, often marginalized in the national-communist regime that was gradually shaped in Romania. Nevertheless, Judith embodies a transnationality of memory through her multiple scales of belonging as well as her international trajectory, of moving from one place to the other.

Fernando

As opposed to the young men whom Mihaela saw in the airport on her leaving day, Fernando left Romania earlier, as most Chileans who arrived in 1973. His family came in exile to Bucharest, responding to the opening of the Romanian government to take in Chilean refugees after the coup. Fernando´s father spent 3 months in Chilean detention centres, and then the whole family left for Romania. In 1985, his sister left for Cuba, while his parents left to Sweden. Only Fernando stayed to complete his studies in architecture in Bucharest, which he left in 1987 to join his parents in Sweden. His remembrance of Romania is centred on two aspects. First, he mentioned his ‘eternal gratitude’ for how wonderfully they were received there. But the second thread relates to the period after he left the Chilean-centred life in the blocks of flats dedicated to refugees and started making Romanian friends at the university. He mentioned that as an eye-opening experience: ‘I saw how hard it was actually for Romanians, I saw how the dictatorship really worked’. He recalls how most of his university colleagues had one dream: to escape. Some tried to swim across the Danube to Yugoslavia, seen as a liberal regime and a window to the West. Three ended up in prison.

Fernando recalls his first impression of Romania: ‘When we left Santiago [under the military dictatorship], the airport was filled with soldiers. When we arrived in Bucharest, the airport was also filled with soldiers. I said to myself- where have we come?’. He remembers how one boy seated next to him on the plane asked with concern how would they cross the Iron Curtain- ‘is there a special hole in this curtain, for planes?’. That is to say, no one really knew much about where they were going. Arrived, they were pleasantly surprised that the language was not the impenetrable Slavic they feared. ‘How do you say meat (Spanish. carne) in Romanian? “carne”! what about house (Spanish “casa”). “Casa!”. We can live here, people said’.

Fernando left Chile as a 14 year old and spent 29 years away, in Romania and Sweden. Yet he adds that this time frame should be seen as double- ‘In 29 years, Chile developed in one direction, while I developed in a different direction’.

Two threads of underlying suffering coexisted: one caused by knowing what was happening in Chile, and the second one, of the experience of exile. The memory of the lived experiences under the Chilean dictatorship and the awareness that the country was going through it stayed within the community. Fernando recalls how his father woke up at times from nightmares that he was being tortured again. Yet as he woke up, he realized he was in Romania and felt relief.

The Chilean exile community was placed by the Romanian authorities in a series of apartment buildings with 8 floors, 6 flats by floor. Fernando described the feeling of community, of children playing, of people singing together. ‘The militia never came to our blocks, despite the noise, there was always music until 3 AM. We were protected’. Yet there were voices in the community who were critical of this constant playful atmosphere: ‘How can you have fun, when in Chile there is a dictatorship’. Back in Chile, Fernando realized that similar things happened there-people continued to live, to have parties under the dictatorship.

In his immersion in the Romanian college student community, Fernando was impressed by the humour they shared in close circles with regard to the dictatorship. Returned to Chile, he discovered a similar humour with regard to Pinochet´s regime. He pondered whether this has to do with the fact that Romanians and Chileans were similar, that people undergoing dictatorship live through similar experiences, or both.

The Chileans regarded the Romanian state fondly. Fernando recalls how there was a state employee who would come regularly to check on the needs of the community. Yet he underlines that the situation started going downhill after the earthquake of 1977. Fernando became aware of the regime´s problems particularly after he started making Romanian friends. Yet he describes a reluctance from the wider Chilean community to discuss anything negative at the time. He recalls frequent discussions about dictatorships, in which when he would bring in the situation of Eastern bloc dictatorships, his countrymen would often cut him off saying ‘Let us not speak about Romania. Look, in the German Democratic Republic, in Hungary, in Poland, everywhere, it is actually a socialist paradise’. Fernando started believing he was living in the exception in the socialist block, but later, in Sweden heard about the deprivations in Poland and started asking questions about state socialist regimes in general. He started sharing the problems of his Romanian friends or giving examples of those whom he knew and who ended up in prison or in mental hospitals for having been vocal against the regime. Other Chileans accused him then of being an agent of global capitalism. Yet the community was challenged when one of the Chileans, who worked in a mental hospital, reported that one patient whom he found unusually coherent and knowledgeable was interned, according to a Romanian doctor, for his political views, by having stated that the communist party was oppressing the people.

Most Chilean exiles decided to leave Romania in the mid-1980s and most went to countries outside of the Soviet bloc. Fernando also joined his parents in Sweden, after which he returned to Chile. Back in Santiago, Fernando encountered his high-school girlfriend from Bucharest, another Chilean from an exiled family. Their joint memories and outlook about Chile from the perspective of their international exposure to the socialist dictatorship in Romania made them both interested in social justice, but without celebrating the ideology in Chile that they see as purist and rigid. The two got back together as a couple in Santiago, where they live now.

Fernando attends every year the commemoration of the coup, yet he is critical of Chile´s memory culture today. In the Cementerio General, he reacted negatively to what he calls a ‘cult of memory’-. He criticized the younger generations for having created a narrative of a perfect socialism that was destroyed by Pinochet and the USA and who often do not want to hear anything from people who have experienced the times in Chile or elsewhere. As Mihaela, he opposes the memory of experience to the memory as ritual.

Maria

Maria came to Romania from Cuba, where her Chilean family went first in exile. In 1970s Cuba, she recalls, there were significant food shortages after Castro´s decision to focus on sugar cane production to the detriment of consumer goods. However, Maria defines herself as a Marxist-Leninist to this day and she underlines her love for Cuba and Fidel. Yet when they arrived in Romania in mid-1970s, she recalls seeing 16 types of bread in a supermarket, cheese and ham, and saying ‘this is the land of plenty … I said to myself, look, what socialism can achieve’. Maria left Romania after 2 years to join a fighters’ collective in Nicaragua. ‘The movement needed me’, she added. Her memory of Romania is focused on the solidarity of a socialist country and its success in catering for the people.

Imagined homelands

Diasporic imaginations are often associated with an exoticization of the homeland (Cohen 2008). Nevertheless, Southeastern European lands of origin are described in a less positive tone, as places of hardship and challenges. A daughter of Romanian immigrants in Chile described that she imagined Romania to be ‘less colorful than Chile’. A number of descendants of Croat Chileans in Punta Arenas described to me Croatia as a windy, cold, barren land, revealing perhaps a lack of curiosity of checking the abundant paradise photos appearing galore on google, and projecting in fact a similar image of their Southern windswept Magallanes region on the lands their forefathers left for economic reasons.

Yet where imaginaries fit other diasporic echoes are in depicting the people. ‘Romanians are more gregarious than Chileans’ one young woman said. She added ‘they are much more Latin than the Chileans’, catering to the self-image of Chileans as the more reserved inhabitants of South America, or the ‘English of Latin America’.

Those who have migrated say that there is very little knowledge of the countries of Southeastern Europe in Chile. Nevenka decried the lack of knowledge and interest in both the language and the region. A Romanian in Copiapó stated that Chileans would not know anything about Ceausescu’s dictatorship, as they barely even know that Romania is in Eastern Europe.

Countermemories of discrimination

Many migrants highlighted the sense of belonging to their host country and the perception of solidarity, and inclusion: a memory of welcoming countries where they felt at home. Nevertheless, for some of my interlocutors, countermemories of discrimination also emerged. They are countermemories as they disrupt the overall memory of a good reception and the sense of belonging that my interlocutors generally expressed. Some forms of discrimination are specific to the Cold War context, and relate to a lack of trust of those coming from the other side of the ideological barrier. For instance, one of the exiled Chileans stated that at their return from Romania, her mother could not find work as teacher in Chile, and she was told that the state would not trust someone who could have been a spy of a socialist country.

Other forms of discrimination occur in relationship to otherization of migrants specific to many societies, as well as racial discrimination. The otherization of migrants occurs in many societies, and contemporary Chile and Southeastern Europe display this quite prominently (Mora 2008; Ryburn 2016). A number of Romanians in Chile emphasized that when one comes as a visitor, they are well received. But if they decide to stay, they are avoided, criticized, and relegated as others. Mihaela criticized what she saw as false solidarity: ‘the exiles center on their trauma, but somehow conveniently forget that in the countries they were received they had free education and all, while now Chileans treat the foreigners so badly here’.

Amidst the exiled Chileans in Romania, the memory of occasional discrimination counteracted those of socialist solidarity. One story that circulated was that of the young man who would travel always in the second car of the tram, as his darker features (‘a Mapuche face’) would mistake him for a Roma from Giulesti. His sister, ‘a blonde’ (ie. light haired in both Chilean and Romanian descriptions) could go in the first car, but he took the second. The racism against the Roma, extended towards those who would remind of the Roma through perceptions of brownness, comes to challenge the usual depiction of the solidarity between people of the socialist bloc and those from the Global South (Mark et al. 2019). Instead, while official discourse did focus on solidarity, in order to show contrast to the West, and in particular to racism in the USA, this was not echoed by the local population, with racism remaining a problem in the Southeastern European region (Baker 2018). Similarly, one of my interlocutors, born in Chile, described that land as ‘a country with brown people who are themselves racists’, with attitudes towards other Latin American often seen as xenophobic.

The experience of Eastern European migrants in Chile is different from this perspective. In their appearance, they are assimilated to other Chileans of European stock. The Croatian Chileans are recognized as Chileans. For the more recent arrivals, particularly during the Cold War, their belonging to a different space, an imagined East, did emerge as a separator, as particularly Mihaela´s account underlined. Moreover, other forms of othering, such as the reaction to the Serbian woman´s ethnicity by the clerk, do occur. As such East European migrants on the one hand benefit from their salient Europeanness (and whiteness), but on the other are subjects of othering with an orientalist undertone in Chile as they are in Europe (Bideleux 2015).

Conclusion: migration memory as challenge to memory regimes

The autobiographical memory accounts of individual migration, as well as the broader discussion of diasporic groups lead us to two main points. The first one relates to the sense of belonging and identity: while individual migrants of the Cold War times aim to fit in and at times reject transnationality as unsettling, for the subsequent generations, as well as for established diasporas, transnationality is the main framework of identity-construction, despite not having a lived experience of both places. While much work on diasporic contexts focus on imagined ‘homelands’, implying a longing for faraway places, Mihaela reveals that home is also the place where one comes of age. The need for belonging appears as a central feature of the earlier migrant experience, including Mihaela´s. As opposed to her desire to belong, the sense of a transient presence for the Romanians of Copiapó created a liberation from a definitive belonging and an almost phenomenological interest in being in place and the sheer experience. Conversely, the generations tracing their descent to Croatia would frequently speak about their Croatianness without knowing much about the country, nor actually expressing an interest in it. Yet their sense of belonging is also important- Croatianness is important for many of them as a marker of distinction. In contrast, transnationality and in-betweenness emerge in the experiences of those who changed countries, like Judith, or who came for a shorter period of times, like the Romanians of Copiapó. The migrant experience between the Cold War camps does not feature however the full dimensions of the transnational migration experience as in the Glick et al. model. It is relegated to particular experiences or to newer migration.

The second point that emerged is that migrants who experienced authoritarian regimes operate within a framework of vernacular comparisons, where they confront the memory of their experiences of dictatorship, evaluate the intensity of regimes in a relational manner, and reach to a hierarchization. In the case of older Romanian migrants or Chilean exiles in Romania like Fernando, they are portraying a more severe dictatorship in the case of Romania. Yet for those who did not experience both systems, the abundance of memory practice in Chile and the relative absence in Romania makes them hierarchize differently. Moreover, the attitudes towards the nature of Tito´s regime in the Chilean Croatian community are neutral in the context of lack of knowledge, or negative for those who come in contact with the newly mobilized identity-boosting memory regime of selected local elites, who become memory entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, in the broader landscape of memory cultures in the countries discussed, these accounts are largely ignored.

While this article examined the relationship between migration and memory through migrants who left for a wider array of reasons, one further study could compare these experiences with those who underwent migration specifically for ideological reasons (for instance Chilean exiles vs. Croatian groups in Argentina, who fled after 1945 opposing Tito/Romanian anti-communist exiles in countries experiencing right-wing dictatorships). Such a study could scrutinize the role of ideological group identity in creating memory frames that challenge dominant memory regimes in remembering dictatorships.

The experience of exile and migration between Chile and the socialist bloc has a negligible impact on remembrance in Southeastern Europe, where the Pinochet regime and the Chilean memory processes after are largely absent from public awareness. Similarly, the experiences in the socialist bloc are also absent from the main memory debates in Chile. Nevertheless, the experiences of this migration complicate the largely binary social worlds of Chile´s politics and memory cultures. A man with an interest in social justice like Fernando is scornful of both the memory narratives and the political project of parts of Chile´s left. However, while people like Fernando highlight nuance, there is also the possibility of these accounts to be hijacked by the right, rather than to complexify the left´s memory account. These individual memory accounts show a friction to the dominant memory frames in Chile. Moreover, this discussion shows how migration memory offers the opportunity of engagement of memory regimes across regions, and of tempering claims through the recontextualization of memory frames. While these accounts remain countermemories, they have the potential to infuse national memory debates with not only a transnational dimension, but also to complicate the emergence of specific memory regimes that get ossified (David 2020), and, instead to galvanize memory as a dynamic process of dealing with the past.

Acknowledgments

I would like to first thank my interlocutors for their time and sharing their life stories. I am thankful to the editors of the special issue for the invitation and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. I am also grateful to the members of the Anthropology colloquium at the University of Konstanz for the feedback on an early draft, with special thanks to Felix Girke.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK and the French LABEX Les passés dans le present through the project ‘The Criminalisation of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective’, grant AH/N504580/1

Notes

1. I thank Thomas Kirsch for this concept.

2. The research project also involved other sites of memory in the above countries, as well as in Argentina and Uruguay; abovementioned are just the locations where material used for this article was found.

3. See (Badescu 2019) for a discussion of memorialization patterns related to the cultural memory of dictatorship in the Southern Cone and Southeastern Europe.

4. http://www.quepasa.cl/articulo/actualidad/2011/07/1-6107-9-de-transilvania-a-copiapo.shtml/