Fare storia orale nel Cile dell’Estallido social: Tra nostalgie del fordismo e memorie della dittatura di Pinochet

This essay examines the impact of the Chilean Estallido Social (2019-2020) on research into working-class memory in Chile, highlighting how the country’s political conjuncture necessitated a reconsideration of the study’s initial objectives. Through a reflection on fieldwork and a corpus of thirty interviews conducted between 2020 and 2023, this contribution explores the relationship between historia reciente, memory, and the historian’s subjectivity. The analysis of oral sources reconstructs, on the one hand, the meanings currently attributed to Fordist working-class identity in a context of deindustrialization, tracing the transformation from a rural society to an industrial one and its subsequent transition to a post-industrial reality. On the other hand, the study delves into the connection between contemporary political repression and the institutional violence practices inherited from Pinochet’s dictatorship, situating them within a broader interpretative framework that underscores their continuity over time.