Abstract
June 24, 2011, 5:30 pm: Thousands of raggedly clothed bodies, faces pale and sunken, break out into dance to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ in front of the Chilean Presidential Palace. Wearing tombstones around their necks, these ‘zombies’ are really students who have become deeply indebted in their pursuit of education. But how to change an entrenched system that perpetuates extreme inequalities of wealth and resources? Well, the students suggest, via flash mob, for starters.
Sounds interesting? Google ‘Thriller por la educación’—or the kiss-ins, beach days, super hero battles, marathons, or other protests orchestrated by the Chilean Student Movement that followed—and you can re-witness the whole event, even choose between myriad viewing angles. Keep sifting through the search results, and you might learn how the protests were planned, rehearsed, or about their international media after-lives.
Given the liminal nature of its dissidents, the Chilean Student Movement needed an appealing and enduring mode of protest to achieve results in the face of constant turnover. This chapter explores the lessons offered by the Chilean students’ fusion of performance, charisma, fiesta, and digital archive in order to sustain resistance in an ongoing push for reform of their educational system.
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Notes
- 1.
‘I died owing 35,000,000. Rest in peace.’ This is approximately US$53,500 at today’s exchange rate (US$64,000 at the time of the event). All translations that follow are my own.
- 2.
‘I sold my organs to pay for my education.’
- 3.
Daniella Wittern Bush, ‘Words that Speak, Literature that Acts: Diamela Eltit’s Narrative Performances,’ PhD diss., Brown University, 2012.
- 4.
The ‘Organic Constitutional Law of Teaching,’ popularly known within Chile as ‘la LOCE.’
- 5.
While the pingüinos only involved high school students, this number means that, given Chile’s population at the time, 1 out of every 20 Chileans was involved.
- 6.
Quality Reform for Education.
- 7.
The National Student Assembly.
- 8.
The General Education Law’s major provision limited the ability of educational establishments to consider a student’s financial background during the admission process. It also made changes to what would be considered elementary- and middle-school curriculum, and to the prerequisites for an educational institution to be recognized by the government.
- 9.
Juan Pablo Figueroa and Tania Araya detail the significance of Norte Sur’s takeover of the Universidad Central in their article, ‘Académicos se transforman en accionistas. El negocio que esconde la venta de la Universidad Central,’ Centro de Investigación Periodística, April 28, 2011.
- 10.
As reported by the Chilean newspaper La nación. Regardless of the official headcount, aerial photographs and videos of the protest confirm that the involvement was massive.
- 11.
See ‘The Fraught Politics of the Classroom’ from The Economist online, October 29, 2011, for a revealing discussion of Chilean student debt.
- 12.
The ‘Chicago Boys’ were a group of Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger as part of the U.S. State Department’s ‘Chile Project,’ an academic effort to influence international economic policies. Upon their return, the ‘Chicago Boys’ rose to prominent government positions across a number of South American countries, and were strongly embraced by Pinochet. They are credited with what Friedman termed ‘the miracle of Chile,’ transforming the country into Latin America’s strongest economy by advocating the hallmark free-market policies of neoliberalism—privatization and deregulation—to the benefit of large corporations. For further reading, see: The Heritage Foundations’ ‘Chile, Index of Economic Freedom’; Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; Gary Becker’s ‘What Latin America Owes to the “Chicago Boys”’; El Ladrillo: Bases de la Política Económica del Gobierno Militar Chileno; and Carlos Fuentes’ 2015 documentary Chicago Boys.
- 13.
From Francisco Goldman, ‘Camila Vallejo, the World’s Most Glamorous Revolutionary,’ New York Times, April 5, 2012.
- 14.
César Chelala writes, ‘Chilean economist Marcel Claude has found that student debt is close to 174% of Chilean students’ annual salary upon graduation—and 50% among them are heavily indebted. The average Chilean university student graduates with $45,000 in debt—a larger burden than even in the United States, where the comparable figure is about $27,000.’ See ‘In Chile, Dissent Has a Woman’s Face,’ The Globalist, August 30, 2011.
- 15.
‘We [students] are zombies watching how education in this country is dying […].’ ‘Thriller por la educación.mpg.flv,’ Endless Video, accessed October 11, 2017. https://endlessvideo.com/watch?v=JJcOrWaViWg.
- 16.
‘What we wanted was to push aside the bad that is always shown in protests and demonstrate that we, the youth, can commit ourselves to a good cause.’ ‘En Chile jóvenes bailan ‘Thriller’ por una mejora en la educación,’ CubaDebate. Contra el Terrorismo Mediatico, June 26, 2011, accessed April 24, 2013. http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2011/06/26/en-chile-jovenes-bailan-thriller-por-una-mejora-en-la-educacion/#.Wd51-q3MzGI.
- 17.
For links to the Facebook event invite, planning videos, and much of the documentation of the event itself, see Artivismos (blog), ‘“Gaga-so por la Educación”/‘Gagazo por la Educación’ (flashmob USACh),’ posted July 13, 2011. http://artivismos.blogspot.com/2011/08/gagazo-por-la-educacion-flashmob.html.
- 18.
‘The Giant Cueca [Andean dance] for Education.’ Due to space limitations, this chapter cannot detail all actions of the 2011 Chilean student movement to the present. Nonetheless, students continue to take to the streets in the name of a free, quality education for all, and on July 7, 2017, this took the form of a second Cuecazo por la educación in front of the Universidad de Chile’s theatre.
- 19.
The Cueca is a partner dance that has long been used to stage protest: during Pinochet’s dictatorship, widowed women would dance the cueca alone, carrying photographs of loved ones who had ‘disappeared.’ With the Cuecazo, students re-instrumentalized a rite of Chilean citizenship that carries the trace of performed dissent, bringing both connotations into their struggle to guarantee free, equal, and quality education for all Chileans.
- 20.
‘We Return Looking for Free Education.’
- 21.
Antofagasta’s flash mob breaks with the established pattern in that it built off a separate, digital action by a group of students from the Universidad de Chile, who on July 8, 2011, released a YouTube video ad campaign inviting anyone who had not yet joined the student movement to mobilize themselves in the name of education. Rewriting the song ‘Summer Nights’ from the musical Grease, their video portrays Sandy as a participant in the student occupation of the university while her boyfriend relaxes at home and plays video games. Eventually he joins the student movement, and the video closes with the two singing together, ‘Somos dos endeudados / pero […] ah […] cambiarémos la historia.’ (‘We are just two debters / but […] we will change history’). See ‘“Grease” De La Toma Estudiantil En Chile,’ El Centinela, July 8, 2011, accessed December 10, 2016. https://centinela66.com/2011/07/08/grease-de-la-toma-estudiantil-en-chile/.
- 22.
‘Come to save education—heroes for education’ in Santiago’s Plaza de Armas. See Artivismos (blog) for organizing details and videos of the event. ‘Superhéroes y Villanos por la Educación, flashmob,’ posted July 18, 2011. http://artivismos.blogspot.com/2011/08/superheroes-y-villanos-por-la-educacion.html.
- 23.
‘Super Indebted.’
- 24.
‘We, the Super Villains, own the universities.’
- 25.
‘In love but in debt’, ‘With passion for education.’
- 26.
The besatón was replicated in Concepción and Antofagasta. Santiago’s sequel in September of 2011 carried a new undertone: the re-kiss-in denounced the violence between the encapuchados (hooded rioters) and police that had turned tragic at the end of August with the death of 16-year-old Manuel Gutierrez. Instigating chaos at the end of many student protests, the rioters’ identity remains under debate: Piñera’s government cited them to discredit the movement as a whole, while student leaders suggested they were either state infiltrators inciting violence to break up demonstrations and challenge the public’s empathy toward the students, or anarchists taking advantage of their cause.
- 27.
‘The Politics of Passion,’ E-misférica, special issue ‘Dissidence,’ 10, no. 2 (Summer 2013). http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-102/taylor.
- 28.
Term taken from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985). In Boal’s ‘forum theater,’ audience members did not simply watch a drama unfold, but could stop a performance at any time to suggest ways to alter the action, or even step onstage themselves, becoming part of the performance.
- 29.
Taylor, ‘The Politics of Passion’; Taylor cites Kant’s ‘The Contest of the Faculties (1798),’ in Kant’s Politics Writings, ed. Hans S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 182.
- 30.
‘Marathoners for education’ and ‘1,800 hour race for education.’
- 31.
In 2011, 5000 Chileans lived in Argentina, where public education is free at all levels, because it was dramatically cheaper to pay rent in Argentina than to live at home and pay tuition in Chile. Calling themselves ‘exiliados económicos y sociales’ (economic and social exiles), these Chileans saw themselves as forced to live abroad due to the exorbitant cost of education in Chile. For more, see ‘Los exiliados del modelo chileno,’ La Pulseada, October 12, 2011, accessed January 8, 2017. http://www.lapulseada.com.ar/site/?p=2585.
- 32.
A Facebook event for this protest was titled, ‘Jornada continental de movilización en defensa de la eduación’ (‘Day of Continental Mobilization in Defense of Education’), and used to publicize the action throughout Latin America.
- 33.
‘Because media sells so much in Chile.’ ‘Thriller por la educación.mpg.flv,’ Endless Video.
- 34.
See Mike Celizic, ‘“Thriller” Video Remains a Classic 25 Years Later,’ Today Show—Today Entertainment online, April 26, 2008, accessed April 30, 2013. Similarly, John Lynch’s article for Business Insider, ‘The 50 Best-Selling Albums of All Time,’ September 23, 2016. http://businessinsider.com/50-best-selling-albums-all-time-2016-9, confirms that even today, ‘Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” currently boasts a sales mark that no album is likely to touch anytime in the near or distant future.’
- 35.
I cannot discuss Camila Vallejo (former president of the University of Chile’s student federation) at length here, but her leadership was an essential factor contributing to the ‘marketing’ of the Chilean student movement to the international media. Francisco Goldman’s New York Times article from April of 2012 sums up Camila’s aesthetic ‘marketing’ appeal, although failing to convey her intelligence and determination, in his title: ‘Camila Vallejo, the World’s Most Glamorous Revolutionary.’ Adored by many, Camila’s face has appeared on the front pages of myriad international publications—she was The Guardian’s 2011 ‘Person of the Year’—and in video interviews with media from around the world; yet she is hated by others who dismiss her for being a Communist, or disregard her work for education reform as the demands of a spoiled child who would rather go on strike than actually attend school.
- 36.
As conducted from the United States. Google search results vary across time and space, so a search from Chile or Argentina, for example, may turn up different results.
- 37.
When I first began working on this topic, www.reformaeducacional.cl was an active website constantly being added to and regularly accessed. Six years later, the URL no longer works, but I believe that the type of archive they created offers a useful model for other movements.
- 38.
Neither lafech.tumblr.com nor the Fech’s Flickr stream are currently available, as the student movement has consolidated its social media presence to platforms that have broader reach and offer more capabilities—at present, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
- 39.
See Rebecca Schneider, Performance Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 40.
‘The voice of the street is not always the voice of the nation’ (December 2011).
- 41.
See ‘Chile: Piñera censura a ‘minoría de delincuentes’ durante protesta estudiantil,’ América Economía, June 26, 2013, accessed September 1, 2013. https://www.americaeconomia.com/politica-sociedad/politica/chile-pinera-censura-minoria-de-delincuentes-durante-protesta-estudiantil.
- 42.
Before the United Nations in September 2011, two weeks after violence at the protests ended in the shooting of a 16-year-old by the police, Piñera declared: ‘En las últimas semanas han sido miles los jóvenes chilenos que han salido a las calles a manifestarse en favor de una causa noble, hermosa y legítima como es una educación de calidad para todos, que les permita ser protagonistas y no meros espectadores de esta sociedad del conocimiento y la información.’ (‘In the last weeks, it has been thousands of young Chileans who have gone out into the streets to demonstrate in the name of a cause that is as noble, beautiful, and legitimate as a quality education for all, a cause that allows them to be protagonists and not mere spectators in this society of knowledge and information.’).
- 43.
‘The first project that I am going to send to Congress will put an end to profit and advance free education at all levels.’ Rocío Montes, ‘El movimiento estudiantil marca la campaña presidencial en Chile,’ El País, April 13, 2013. https://elpais.com/internacional/2013/04/13/actualidad/1365815591_316625.html.
- 44.
See Benedict Mander’s article in The Financial Times online, ‘Chile’s President Aims to Soothe Investors over Reforms,’ June 2, 2014. https://www.ft.com/content/28013328-e9d9-11e3-99ed-00144feabdc0.
- 45.
Just before the elections, Melissa Sepulveda, the then-president of the Universidad de Chile’s student federation, went on record as saying she would not vote for any of the former student leaders, because ‘Creo que las posibilidades de transformación no están en el Parlamento.’ [‘I believe that the possibility of transformation doesn’t reside in Congress.’] See ‘Presidenta electa FECh: No votaría por Giorgio Jackson ni Camila Vallejo,’ Cooperativa.cl , November 13, 2013. https://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/pais/educacion/universidades/presidenta-electa-fech-no-votaria-por-giorgio-jackson-ni-camila-vallejo/2013-11-13/092648.html.
References
Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985.
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Chelala, César. ‘In Chile, Dissent Has a Woman’s Face.’ The Globalist, August 30, 2011. https://www.theglobalist.com/in-chile-dissent-has-a-womans-face/.
‘Chile: Piñera censura a ‘minoría de delincuentes’ durante protesta estudiantil.’ América Economía, June 26, 2013. https://www.americaeconomia.com/politica-sociedad/politica/chile-pinera-censura-minoria-de-delincuentes-durante-protesta-estudiantil.
‘En Chile jóvenes bailan ‘Thriller’ por una mejora en la educación.’ CubaDebate. Contra el Terrorismo Mediatico, June 26, 2013. http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2011/06/26/en-chile-jovenes-bailan-thriller-por-una-mejora-en-la-educacion/#.Wd51-q3MzGI.
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Sepulveda, Melissa. ‘Presidenta electa FECh: No votaría por Giorgio Jackson ni Camila Vallejo.’ Cooperativa.cl, November 13, 2013. https://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/pais/educacion/universidades/presidenta-electa-fech-no-votaria-por-giorgio-jackson-ni-camila-vallejo/2013-11-13/092648.html.
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Bush, D.W. (2019). Their Dissidence Remains: Lessons from the 2011 Chilean Student Movement. In: Alvarez, N., Lauzon, C., Zaiontz, K. (eds) Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times. Contemporary Performance InterActions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11557-9_4
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