Spaces of Care and the Politics of Resistance for Children and Youth in Pinochet’s Chile

Resistance to military rule in Chile gave rise to new spaces of care, such as Catholic Church-run soup kitchens, summer camps, and afterschool programs. By 1976, over 30,000 children in Santiago ate daily at the more than 300 soup kitchens. Contrary to the military regime’s efforts to shape school children into apolitical, consumer citizens, these spaces offered an alternative political socialization centered on solidarity and care as forms of resistance. Drawing on oral histories and archival material related to the Vicariate of Solidarity’s social programs, this presentation traces how working-class teenagers acted as surrogate parents by providing care to younger, non-related neighborhood children whose absent biological parents were either political prisoners or unemployed and looking for work. In exploring these spaces of care and the affective relationships that they generated, I highlight how practices of solidarity were grounded in established Catholic and leftist political organizing traditions. Working-class youth sought not only to shield younger children from the most ferocious side of political and economic violence, but also to invite them to reflect on and process the experience of dictatorship as it was happening. The discourses surrounding the community-minded, self-sacrificing teenage counselors sought to counter dominant constructions of working-class youth, particularly adolescent boys, as dangerous delinquents. If Catholic Church-affiliated soup kitchens offered nutrition and a safe space to play for young children, they also provided a protected space for adolescents by bringing them into community and into a place in the struggle against dictatorship.