“Allá eras un chilenito y acá un cubanito, cachai?”. “Return” and uprooting experience of the second generation of Chilean exile. Interview with Lumi

Abstract

Life stories approached with the methodology of oral history allows the access to invisible or silenced memories and paths within the complex and multidimensional phenomenon of political exile, allowing the opening to topics and dimensions of personal and collective experiences. Adopting this perspective and with the aim of contributing to the line studies of the second generation of the exiles of the Southern Cone during the second half of the twentieth century, this article presents an interview with Lumi, a daughter of exiled Chilean activists of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, born in Cuba in 1975, whose family was reunited in Chile in 1991. The topics covered in it are: the effects of exile in children; the experiences in Cuba of the seventies and eighties under the Homes Project; installation difficulties in Chile by the end of the dictatorship and the complex processes of identification and adaptation or or the rejection of her family’s country of origin.