June 11, 2012
Aguirre’s riveting memoir chronicles her childhood as the daughter of Chilean resistance fighters. Aguirre’s parents fled to Canada in 1974 after the overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende. Five years later the Chilean resistance called for exiled activists to return to South America. Many women sent their children to Cuba to live with relatives rather then take them back to Chile and imperil their safety . The family settled in La Paz, Bolivia, setting up a safe house for individuals involved in the struggle. At 18, Aguirre became a member of the resistance. Relocating to Argentina, she carried out dangerous missions while having the cover of an ordinary day job. Dressed as a professional with her hair streaked with blond highlights, her makeup heavy, and her shoulder pads huge, she battled back her fears of being imprisoned and tortured: “The Terror came in waves, sometimes forcing me to hang on to walls as I walked down the street.” While adroitly chronicling her remarkable childhood within the constricted world of exiled revolutionaries, Aguirre simultaneously untangles the complex political, economic, and cultural currents sweeping South America, ushering in the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. Aguirre’s writing is splendid; she combines black humor and a sharp intellect and tells her powerful story in grand style.
August 1, 2012
A sentimental education among anarchists, Trotskyists and Tupamaros. Now a popular actress and playwright in her adopted Canada, in 1973 Aguirre fled her native Chile as a 6-year-old with her parents following the coup against the government of Salvador Allende. She returned six years later with her mother, a peace-loving hippie turned resistance fighter who "had made it clear from day one that the refugee thing in the imperialist North was not for us." Fast-forward to the teen years spent on the run throughout much of South America; it was an adolescence with the usual fixations, but some out-of-the-ordinary ones as well--e.g., "My assertion that Loverboy was from Vancouver had been met with sidelong glances among my friends. My school friends in Canada reacted the same way when I talked about stadiums being used as concentration camps in Chile and Bolivia." While in Argentina, Aguirre surveyed the scene of a country reeling from yet another dictatorship after a woefully misguided war against Britain, when the walls were beginning to tumble down. Most of her youthful revolutionary acts, from bringing down the mighty to plotting to assassinate Augusto Pinochet, did not come to fruition, but Aguirre is usually funny and self-deprecating rather than rueful or repentant. Not necessarily uplifting, but often oddly entertaining--certainly more so than Giorgio's Memoirs of an Italian Terrorist (2003), which Aguirre's reminiscences complement.
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