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I AM VIVIANA GALLARDO
HER NIECE

 

My aunt Catalina was born in Santiago on December 3, 1945. Charming and cheerful, she was the second of four kids born to my grandparents, Ofelia and Alberto. When she was twelve-years old she went to Buenos Aires with her whole family because my grandfather, who was a lathe operator and a communist, had been fired from the railways in the days of Gonzalez Videla. Most of her childhood was spent in Buenos Aires and it was an important experience for all of us. In Argentina, my aunt got involved with the Catholic church and she worked with children.

When they returned to Chile, she enrolled in a secretarial program at Manpower and joined the Catholic Youth Workers. She was a woman who was committed, caring and fair. She was deeply concerned for others and perhaps that’s why she joined the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left).

A cherished memory from my childhood is seeing my Aunt Cati, at her vanity table filled with perfumes and things, and she would say to me, be careful there! She liked to enjoy life: she danced like a spinning top! She taught me how to dance Cumbia and rock ‘n’ roll; she taught me how to be organized and I understood what it meant to be an independent woman. She played with me then and was always very caring with me.

In 1973 she married my Uncle Rolando in a ceremony at home, and they had a son, my cousin Beto, whom she didn’t get to see grow up because on November 18, 1975, they arrested us along with seven other family members in our house on Herrera Street. We never saw her again.

She was my Aunt Catalina Gallardo Moreno, executed on November 19, 1975, and I am Viviana Gallardo and I remember her.

 

 

 

//You too should remember them

 

 

 

 

 

To read an interview with Daniel Borzutzky, [Click Here]

 

Raúl Zurita‘s books of poems include, among others: Purgatorio (1979), Anteparaíso (1982), El paraíso está vacío (1984), Canto a su amor desaparecido (1985), La vida nueva (1994), Poemas militantes (2000); INRI (2003), Los paises muertos (2006) Las cicudades de agua (2007), In Memoriam (2007), Cuadernos de Guerra (2009), Sueños para Kurosawa (2010), and Zurita (2011). Translations to English include Purgatory, Anteparadise, INRI, Song For His Disappeared Love, Dreams for Kurosawa, and Militant Poems. His numerous awards include the National Literature Prize of Chile and the Pablo Neruda Prize. He lives in Santiago, Chile, where he is a professor of literature at Universidad Diego Portales.

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of Lake Michigan, finalist for the 2019 Griffin International Poetry Prize; The Performance of Becoming Human, which received the 2016 National Book Award. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia received the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award. He has translated Raul Zurita’s The Country of Planks and Song for his Disappeared Love; and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.