The 2019 social protests were widely referred to as El estallido. The 2019 estallido was a momentary explosion that shaded powerful light onto events happening in plain sight but so normalized that the broader population could not see it anymore: the everyday despair, dehumanizing public spaces, and the violence in the ways people related to each other (Pena-Pincheira, Bilbao-Nieva, & Romero-Quintana, forthcoming). People in Chile questioned everything they had accepted as given, such as the multiple ways they and their previous generations experienced dispossession, lack of self-determination, and the promise of meritocracy entangled in the rhetoric of progress, sacrifice, and pain. Covid and a never-ending pandemic made these issues even more evident. In this context of sociopolitical and historical awareness, I was moved to revisit my own places of memory and oral traditions of collective family memories that began before my time. Additionally, ongoing women's protests as accusations and refusals of normalized gender violence pushed me to look to my mother's, and grandmother's embodied memories and (her)stories anew. They began to haunt my days and conversations more often. In this dissertation, I examine generational herstories and memories that persist over time due to the violence they carry (e.g., Tuck & Ree, 2013). These haunting memories and experiences stand in plain sight but are shrouded and normalized as part of women's everyday experiences. These stories haunt us as unsolved, inexplicable, and unjust events. In addressing these memories in the classroom through feminist decolonial lenses, participants in the language classroom can recognize hemispheric and normalized logics of gender, class, race violence, dispossession, and death as historically and structurally bounded in ongoing coloniality.
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