Friday, January 29th at 7:30pm
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/97368462608
Meeting ID: 973 6846 2608
Chileans are currently preparing to elect a Constitutional Convention of 155 members, expected to be a mixed of independents and political party representatives, that will write a new constitution from a blank page. The Constitutional Convention will have gender parity and reserved seats for representatives elected by indigenous nations.
The current constitution, imposed in 1980 during the military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet, and fostered during the last 30 years of civilian governance, embedded a model of protected democracy coupled with a raw neoliberal economic model. This has produced one of the most unequal societies in the world, while wiping out 150 years of the Chilean social movement's achievements.
This presentation is about how Chileans have arrived at this extraordinary institutional moment in their history, paradoxically rooted in a deep mistrust of traditional political parties and public institutions, and what the majority of Chileans are hoping for in their new constitution.
===bio====
Lorena Jara Díaz
Lorena is a Chilean-Canadian who arrived in British Columbia in the late 1970s. She became an organizer with the Canadian-Chilean solidarity movement for the defense of human rights in Chile, and later did the same for the El Salvador solidarity movement. In the early 1980s she joined the America Latina al Dia (ALAD) Collective which produced ALAD, the ongoing radio program at Vancouver Cooperative Radio, CFRO. She was an ALAD Collective's member for 13 years, working as a host and producer. She has contributed with public affairs articles about Latin America to Kinesis, Aquelarre, The Republic of East Vancouver, Contratpunto (online), among other alternative media. Lorena was involved in cooperative housing as the leading organizer, from initiation to finalization, of a project located in Vancouver's west side. She was a board member of Headlines Theatre and the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Lorena was the Spanish-English transcriber, translator, and subtitles writer for Nettie Wilde's A Place Called Chiapas and for Mark Akbar's and Jennifer Abbott's The
Corporation. While attending Simon Fraser University, Lorena became a co-chair of her undergraduate and graduate programs' student associations. She was a recipient of the SFU Open Scholarship and of the Roger W. Welch Award for services to the SFU community. She has a double major in Communication and Latin American Studies.
Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iEgsAMYfw2o4PG86_YRmFGWq2wUfL3iP/view?usp=drive_web
Because of sound problems, here are the links to the videos included during the presentation:
Video at the beginning: song El baile de los que sobran, Los Prisioneros (Chile Manifestaciones):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbAuJ0aTg0U
Video ending the presentation: La Primavera de Chile [song: El pueblo unido, Quilapayún- with subtitles]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeDyHEU2G5M
