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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

healing, exile, Canadian exile, Canada Chilean, community

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

Abstract

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.

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