Close Up
Trumper looks at 1970s Chile
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“It was the first time my parents said, ‘You’re going to have to be careful with what you say. You can’t say anything you want to anybody you want.’”
The political turbulence of Chile in the early 1970s is the focus of Camilo Trumper’s first book. For him, it’s both a scholarly interest and a personal interest.
“The Politics of Public Space and Public Art in Santiago, Chile, 1970-1973” traces the time when the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende came into power on Sept. 4, 1970, through the time it was toppled by a military coup on Sept. 11, 1973.
“Now it’s called the other Sept. 11th by some,” says the assistant professor of American studies.
Trumper will offer a preview of his forthcoming book at 4 p.m. Oct. 14 as part of the Humanities Institute’s Scholars at Hallwalls series—formerly Scholars at Muse. The free series runs on select Fridays at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 341 Delaware Ave., Buffalo.
Trumper’s interest in the period and the demonstrative political reaction that resulted came from growing up in an exiled household. His parents were economists working for the Allende government when they were exiled, along with a million other Chileans within months of the coup. They emigrated, first to Mexico and then to Canada, where Camilo was born.
The family eventually settled in Toronto, but after his parents went back to school to become academic sociologists, they began to travel to Chile regularly for extended periods of research with young Camilo in tow. “That informed my life significantly,” he recalls. “I became grounded in Chilean culture of the past.”
The dictatorship was a decade old when he first moved there. It was a period of many protests and unrest, much anti-dictatorship effervescence and also political crackdown. “It was the first time my parents said, ‘You’re going to have to be careful with what you say. You can’t say anything you want to anybody you want,’” he relates. “All of a sudden, we were pulled into a world where people very strongly disagreed with each other and where some very close family members were on opposite political sides.”
As a youngster, Trumper felt the mounting tension of street demonstrations and secret police in Chile. The experience influenced him to eventually pursue the study of how politics becomes woven into the fabric of everyday life and can be analyzed in everyday actions.
His degree from the University of California-Berkeley is in Latin American history and, while his work often is interdisciplinary, the book will be grounded in political and cultural history. “I call it a cultural history of political change in Chile in the 1970s,” he says. “There are few books that bridge the Allende period and the military regime, and flesh out the relationship between the two. My interest is to look at how politics was done in ways that haven’t been given their due or been understood as politically significant in and of themselves.”
Trumper draws on stories of how people laid claim to city streets and walls for marches and murals of political expression, imagining themselves as political citizens in ways that are qualitatively different from the past. “They created new ways of participating in politics. In doing so, they challenged the terms and the limits of political citizenship,” he says.
An early chapter of his book focuses on a famous march in opposition to the Allende government’s lack of food provision to women and children that was organized by middle- and upper-class women in December 1971. The so-called “March of the Empty Pots” brought women from middle- and upper-class areas into downtown Santiago, banging empty pots and pans that became a very vivid and innovative political exercise. “It’s been often analyzed as a point of entry of women into politics,” explains Trumper. “I think it also becomes a way of tying gendered discourses to questions of domesticity, food and provision, family and children.
“It’s also a creative performance by taking it to the streets. All of a sudden, a new language has been crystallized. It can be done publicly and from the home—people coming onto their balconies to bang empty pots and pans. It brings politics into different spheres and allows different people to enter into politics. That’s a thread that runs through the entire book.”
Trumper came to UB in 2008 as part of a project to expand the definition of American studies to the American hemisphere. He teaches Latin American history, urban studies and visual culture.
He and his wife, Dalia Muller, assistant professor in the Department of History and associate director of Caribbean cultural studies, are coordinators of a Humanities Institute workshop called the Transamericas Research Group. Its focus is to establish connections through a transnational approach between faculty and graduate students across UB interested in both Latin American and Caribbean studies south of the border, as well as the experiences of Latin and Caribbean peoples in North America.
He currently is completing his book on a Humanities Institute fellowship.
Trumper and Muller also are involved in civic engagement. Both have participated during the past year in the Community Scholar-in-Residence fellowship program to enable a community research partner from outside academia to spend time at UB working collaboratively with faculty partners on community-based research, education and grant activities. He served as faculty liaison to the inaugural recipient, Eric Walker from PUSH Buffalo. “It’s productive to have university support to foster community relationships,” observes Trumper.
The couple lives with their 2-month-old daughter, Amaya Elena, in one of the West Side’s beautiful older homes. “This is the first place where either of us can imagine ourselves laying down roots,” he says.
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