National Council on Public History

Zachary Daniel McKiernan, ABD, UC Santa Barbara

Proposal Type: Panel

Abstract: On September 11, 1973 the National Stadium of Chile turned toxic when the nation’s newly installed military junta converted it into a concentration camp. For the next fifty-eight days thousands of Chileans and hundreds of foreigners experienced violations of human dignity, physical integrity, and political consciousness. The stadium became the physical and figurative starting point for seventeen years of state-sponsored terrorism under the regime of Augusto Pinochet. Today, though, that is hardly a secret, as stories of the stadium-as-concentration camp have circulated since 1973 to the present in testimonies and memoirs, truth commissions and international reports, newspaper and media accounts, and documentaries and movies. At different times, in different ways, and for different reasons, former stadium prisoners, human rights activists, journalists, judges, state officials, and scholars have sounded off, sometimes in a complementary fashion, other times to clash. Despite the volumes of searchable material (books, memoirs, testimonies) and less tangible but equally telling commemorative events (vigils, theatre productions, public art) that continue at the stadium, no single work has attempted to synthesize, organize, and analyze this historic corpus.

This paper/presentation does that, and is based on my dissertation The Public History of a Concentration Camp: Historical Tales of Tragedy and Hope at the National Stadium of Chile (UC Santa Barbara, 2014). By applying public history knowledge to the stadium-as-concentration camp, I contribute fresh perspectives to the stadium’s place-based memories and the production of historical narratives over time. Moreover, I count observerparticipation as a docent at and advocate of the museum project National Stadium, National Memory, a controversial initiative rooted in the stadium’s 2003 National Monument designation. In doing so, I cut across the edge of public history’s geographic, spatial, and linguistic borders to join international conversations concerning local interpretations of human rights, memorialization as a political and social activity, and community mobilization around the conscious act of truth-telling.

Seeking: A principal goal of the paper/presentation is to convey to non-Chilean audiences the hundreds of historical hands that have contributed to the public knowledge of the stadium-as-concentration camp, and how and where public historians working in comparable environments, communities, and places could contribute to similar types of knowledge. Similarly, I’d like to learn from others who have worked at and collaborated on projects to convert toxic sites into community centers of historical activism. What are the site-specific and methodological/ethical challenges? How are these sites used, commemorated, and/or institutionalized? How does the process of me morialization and history through time affect projected outcomes? Finally, in the Chilean case of the National Stadium, I want to share my experiences of employing public history perspectives in the service of local understandings of human rights, truth, justice, and memory.

Related Topics: Museums/Exhibits, Civic Engagement, Memory

If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: Zachary Daniel McKiernan, zmckiernan[at]umail.ucsb.edu

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Discussion