Michael Hoopes and Dr. Evan Ward, Department of History

The result of my research among the Vancouver, Canada Chilean exile community was overall a positive, more concrete understanding of the mindset of the community, though certain difficulties relating to my inexperience have rendered the data I collected somewhat useless. I entered seeking to more clearly understand the process of healing undergone by Chilean exiles still residing in Canada, as I have noticed a significant lack of exile scholarship that deals with the last twenty years of exile. Since these exiles were forced from Chile by the totalitarian dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s, I entered my research expecting Pinochet’s 1989 loss of power and his 1998 arrest in London on charges of human rights violations to have had significant, positive effects on the mindset of these exiles. Seeing these forms of justice, I hypothesized, would give the exiles a sense of triumph over the very government who forced them out of Chile in the first place. In my six interviews, however, I found that neither event had any significant impact on these individuals’ ability to mentally “move on” and receive closure from their difficult experiences as exiles.

Instead, the individuals interviewed expressed a high degree of discontent over Chile’s 1989 transition to democracy, as the parties legally involved in the governmental transition did not include the Chilean left, a group that included the Chilean Socialist and Communist parties. Multiple individuals I interviewed repeatedly used the term “farce” to label the Chilean transition to democracy, a fact that illustrates the shared pessimism caused by their exile. Similarly, the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet did little to give the exiles any sense of closure or triumph. While Pinochet’s arrest was initially met with much celebration among Vancouver’s exile community, hope quickly turned to discontent as Pinochet was acquitted following the slow, difficult legal process of convicting him of crimes against humanity. Describing their reaction to Pinochet’s 1998 arrest, I sensed that while in 2012 the exiles were eager to admit that they were never really hopeful of the trial, they were in-fact hopeful in 1998. As evidence of this, one woman said in an interview that Vancouver’s Chilean community hosted an impromptu demonstration of support outside the British embassy and later a party that included food and dance to celebrate Pinochet’s arrest, while another woman, also a prominent member of Vancouver’s Chilean community, denied the occurrence of either event.

While my hypothesis was completely disproved through the data gathered in my interviews, the overall theme of the insignificance of the 1989 transition to democracy and the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet would provide a meaningful basis for a paper that I could submit for publication. For this to fully work, however, I would need to conduct further interviews, as the views of only six individuals is entirely insufficient as an acceptable amount of data. I could, however, return to Vancouver at a later date in order to gather more useful data relating to the reaction to these two events. Additionally, I found the subject of healing, closure, and moving on the be a difficult one to address in interviews, as the experience and outlook of each individual varied significantly. Research that seeks to identify common themes and answer why exiled individuals each feel differently about their ability to heal from the experience of exile would be more suitable for a discipline like psychology, not history.

It is difficult to admit that my research has produced largely unworkable data, though I must say that the project has given me an invaluable introduction to qualitative research methods that cannot be obtained through study, but instead must be obtained through experience. Since I have now had such an experience, I will be far more capable to conduct future research in my pursuit of a graduate degree in history. To be specific, I now recognize the importance of obtaining more data, and in the future I will be more aware of the need to conduct as many interviews as possible. Additionally, I will go into each interview with more specific research questions, allowing me to direct the interview in a direction that will help me to interpret my research during my research as opposed to after all the research has been completed. I am also aware of the danger of simply making conversation in an interview while hoping to later find common themes among the interviews conducted. The “just ask questions and then find a common theme” approach does not work for historical research of the qualitative variety. Such an approach will allow me to note the more important parts of an interview, eliminating the need to transcribe every minute of every interview.