Children of exile: Memories in transit and the politicization of the experience

Abstract

The military dictatorships that broke out in South American countries caused an unprecedented and massive wave of exiles. Its novelty lay in the scale of the exile and, above all, in the fact that it impacted entire families. In narratives about exile, children have so far played a secondary role. However, in the new century, the marginal position of the children of exile began to be questioned by the same protagonists who once described exile as a first-person experience rather than a collateral one. This article offers an interpretation of the memories of the South American exile generation and the shifting feelings they have undergone. It hypothesizes that the different memories of the children of exile are in a process of politicization and increasing protagonism. In this transformation, the memories that emerge express a present struggle over the interpretation of the past, which involves positioning children as targets of state violence and exile as a violation of human rights.

Introduction

The military dictatorships that took power in Chile (1973–1990), Uruguay (1973–1985), and Argentina (1976–1983) led to an unprecedented and massive wave of exiles. Exile, understood as a mechanism for excluding individuals from public and civic life (Sznajder and Roniger, 2013), and also as a tool of repression used to silence and neutralize political opposition (Jensen and Lastra, 2016), was a novel experience due to its scale and, above all, because it affected entire families. Although we lack exact figures on the number of exiles and the children who left the region as a consequence of the dictatorships, some researchers agree that between 350,000 and 500,000 people went into exile during these regimes (Jensen and Yankelevich, 2007; Rojas Mira, 2019). In Uruguay’s case, this meant that nearly 10% of the population was outside the country. In Chile’s case, at least 500,000 exiles crossed the Argentine border around the time of the military coup on September 11, 1973. In Argentina, the numbers are more difficult to determine due to the gradual “drip-like” nature of the departures (Jensen and Lastra, 2016).

Despite the familial nature of the exiles, the narratives have predominantly focused on the adults. The parents, particularly the men, started recounting their experiences of exile in books, memoirs, and autobiographies focused on militancy and activism. Children, on the other hand, had a secondary voice and were just another detail in the autobiographies or memoirs written by the adults. With the advent of the new century, the secondary role of the children of exile began to be questioned by the protagonists themselves. It was they who proposed exile as a first-person experience and not as a collateral effect.

This article offers an interpretation of the public memories from the South American exile generation and the shifts in interpretation it undergoes. To do this, it relies on documents and testimonies produced by the children and a bibliography that has tried to discuss the topic. This analysis argues that the different memories of the children of exile are undergoing a process of politicization and rising protagonism. In this transformation, the emerging memories express a current struggle over the interpretation of the past, aiming to show that the children were victims of state violence and not just a side effect.

We speak of a transitional moment because, although it is possible to identify a thriving field of memories of the children of exile in literature, biographical and testimonial narratives, plays and performances, documentaries and films, among others, not all of these narratives have sought to present the experience of exile from a first-person perspective. Instead, narratives have detached the experience of exile from the violence produced by the dictatorships and from the inadequate responses offered by democracies upon their return.

This article is part of a body of work on the children of exile from the Southern Cone, bringing together various studies on the topic. First, undergraduate and postgraduate theses have been developed that focus on extracting the memories of the children of Southern Cone exiles, some of which are analyzed by the case in their national specificity (Chmiel, 2021; Lavín Muñoz and Varas Hurtado, 2013; Norandi, 2021). In addition, testimonial books and analyses of the artistic-cultural practices of the children of exile have been published from different perspectives (Basile and González, 2024; Basso, 2019; Dutrénit Bielous, 2015; García Vázquez, 2022; Levey, 2023). On the other hand, more recently, exile has been studied in the context of childhoods affected by these military dictatorships, breaking the isolation the case had concerning other victims (Castillo, 2019; Chmiel and Argañaraz, 2024; Montealegre and Sapriza, 2022; Pérez and Capdepón, 2023; Porolli, 2016). Most academic productions have dissected experiences in stages and by country. Thus, there are studies on the countries of refuge and the moments of return, focusing on these experiences from a national perspective rather than a regional one (Alberione and Gencarelli, 2023; Burgos, 2020; González de Oleaga et al., 2019; Guelar et al., 2002; Márquez Moreno and Ramírez Fuentes, 2023). In contrast to this established path, this research offers two distinct elements: it focuses on the public memories of the children from a regional perspective (Southern Cone) and, seeks to explain the political connection of these public memories with the repressive experience of exile.

A common theme in academic literature is the discussion on how to name the individuals involved in this experience: Children of exiles, second generation, exiled children, exiled childhoods? These are just a few terms within a conceptual framework that is still under development. The variety of terms reflects the disagreements regarding nature and transmission of that experience: whether the children were objects of repression, or not. That is, whether they were direct or indirect victims of state terrorism. In this regard, post-memory approaches have delved into the inherited nature of some traumatic experiences. Marianne Hirsch (2008) states: “The ‘post’ in ‘post-memory’ signals more than a temporal delay and more than a location in an aftermath” (p. 106). The post-state of memory is related to personal experiences, connected to the original incident but not in a literal or direct way, meaning that the children are neither witnesses nor survivors of the violence. In a way, they are heirs to a traumatic memory that they live as their own, as part of their identity.

Although it is not the aim of this article to provide an in-depth discussion of these terms, we acknowledge them as part of a broader issue regarding the interpretation of the repressive experience. In this study, we refer to them as “children of exile” for the sake of semantic clarity, while acknowledging the ongoing debate on terminology. This category encompasses both children who went into exile with their parents and those born abroad; both groups were affected by state violence and the political persecution experienced by their families, which had a significant impact on their daily lives. In the case of the exiles from the Southern Cone, some works have demonstrated the importance of the subjectivization of violence, even if it was not directly experienced or remembered (Cabrera Sánchez, 2023; Ilse and Willem, 2015; Norandi, 2024). In addition, in the transitions to democracy in the 1980s, approaches to the trauma of the victims provided contributions to this discussion, showing that exile is also articulated in this process of post-memories and is part of a traumatic process on an individual and familial level, but also as a political and transgenerational event (Lastra, 2021). For this reason, the different ways of naming the children of exile highlight a political issue that is transferred to the field of public memory. This issue consists of recovering the connection between the lived (or inherited) experience of violence and the place of these children among the victims of State Terrorism.

We understand State Terrorism as a specific form of state violence implemented by military dictatorships, characterized by the intentional and planned annihilation of everything deemed politically dangerous (Duhalde, 2013 [1983]). This extermination methodology was centered on the forced disappearance of individuals but also involved other repressive mechanisms such as torture, political imprisonment, and exile. Thus, the connection between the exile of children and the broader repressive framework did exist under the Southern Cone dictatorships, but it never occupied a place in public narratives—until now.

This text is written during the 50th anniversary of the military coups that ravaged the region. Military dictatorships succeeded in crafting conflicting narratives for the societies of the Southern Cone. The post-dictatorship governments did not deeply address the experiences and damages of exile. Currently, there is still a lack of understanding regarding the exiles of the children’s generation. It is paramount to analyze the meanings publicly contested by the children to de-naturalize and not perpetuate the silences. As we will see in this study, some children of exile in the Southern Cone have created their own organizations to challenge the public recognition of their exiles and returns. However, the societies and governments of the region still do not include them in the public narratives of State Terrorism.

We believe that we are currently witnessing a significant shift, accompanied by a process of political subjectivation of exile among those who spent their childhoods outside their country of origin. When we speak of political subjectivation, we refer to how an individual adopts a form of selfhood—a way of representing themselves to both themselves and others (Anzaldúa Arce, 2020). Furthermore, drawing on Michel Foucault (2004), subjectivation can be understood as a positioning within power relations, as a process directed not only inward but also outward. For this research, political subjectivation involves a turn in memory toward the public sphere that re-inscribes the experiences of those who were children within broader political frameworks, where politics is not defined solely by the activism of their parents, but also by their position as victims of state repression. This memorial shift in the narratives of children in exile is embedded within a broader process that highlights the experiences of childhood and youth during the dictatorship period. It includes other literary, artistic, and cultural narratives, which, due to space limitations, cannot be explored in depth here.

While these shifts can be interpreted within a wider framework of second-generation memory production, as we will see in this study, the public narratives of the children of exile exhibit several unique features: their emergence and public visibility occurred later than that of other memory groups (particularly the children of the disappeared); it is a form of memory that has been stigmatized in the countries of origin (due to ideas of the “golden exile” or those who “didn’t have it so bad”); and it is marked by social struggles to be recognized within the broader field of victims of State Terrorism. This emerging memory regime of exile includes the voices of those who were children and draws on the language of human rights to assert that exile, too, constitutes a violation of human rights—thus positioning it within the spectrum of state violence committed by the dictatorships, rather than as a personal or private issue.

Regarding methodology, this article is based on interviews conducted by the author, as well as on testimonies drawn from secondary sources (academic books, press interviews, and statements from organizations of the children of exile). The author’s interviews were conducted at various points in time—some during the formative years of these organizations (2006/2017) and others more recently (2024/2025), to explore the process of politicizing the exile experience. This article is based on 20 interviews, of which the most representative of the issue addressed are cited. The interviews covered the following topics: experiences of exile and leaving the country; characteristics of childhood in exile; forms of return; difficulties of reintegration; recognition of their experience as exiles; relationship with other victims of state terrorism; emergence of the organization of the children of exile and the organization’s purposes. ¹ The interviewees currently reside in their countries of origin—Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—except for one, who continues to live in Germany, the country of her family’s exile. Most of them are around 50 years old, played leading roles in the creation of these organizations, and are women. Their accounts of childhood are constructed from an adult perspective, rather than drawn directly from memories formed during childhood. For the purposes of this study, “childhoods in exile” encompasses both individuals who were displaced from their countries of origin as young children (before adolescence) and those born in exile during their parents’ displacement. While gender was not a central analytical category in this research, future studies could explore in greater depth the specific experiences of girls in exile and their roles in shaping public memory in the countries of return. It is important to note that this research does not seek to construct a representative sample of all children of South American exile, nor to meet any statistical criteria regarding their participation in public memory. Instead, the decision was made to include voices that shed light on this transition and offer nuance to the process of political subjectivation and public engagement with exile memories. As a result, one limitation of this study is that certain voices have not been included—such as those of children who, while in their country of origin, chose not to be part of these groups, or those who, living in countries of exile, opted for a more private or quiet life.

The analytical scale adopted here aims to reconstruct this issue from a regional perspective—that is, to examine this experience collectively, without comparing the national cases to one another. A regional perspective is significant for the study of social memory because, while recognizing distinct national histories, it reconstructs a research problem shared by different actors across borders. Moreover, although it does not form a conceptual unity, regional history can highlight the ties that link different national or local histories, delineating a space not bound by administrative borders (Miño Grijalva, 2002). Its strength lies in offering a macro-level perspective on processes that might otherwise be seen as exceptional within national histories—but which, in fact, are not.

In summary, this article addresses generational memories in transition and transformation, drawing on primary sources and interviews with key actors. The text is structured in three parts. First, it analyzes the position of the children of exile within the matrix of State Terrorism. Second, it presents the main characteristics of the return experience of the children of exile as a secondary issue in the transitions to democracy, which obscured the extent of repression at the family level and limited the demand for public recognition of exile. Finally, the study examines the emergence of a new memory regime, shaped by the initiatives and organizational efforts of the children of exile within their respective national contexts. With some variations, this shift in public memory regarding the exile of children from the Southern Cone moves beyond a marginal position to frame exile as a human rights violation.

Children as targets of repression by the Southern Cone dictatorships

The military dictatorships of the Southern Cone used exile as a repressive mechanism. In some cases, in an institutional manner and, in other cases, clandestinely. Exile then, adopted different institutional forms: in Argentina, some exiles were “forced out” from prison, and in Chile, prison sentences were changed to exile. Moreover, there were exile sentences for “subversive acts,” and in many cases, illegal persecution was used to expel those who opposed the authoritarian regime from the country. Exile was therefore a repressive practice within the matrix of State Terrorism, and children had a place in that action.

The Condor Operation carried out in 1975 in the Southern Cone facilitated the coordination of repressive forces for the annihilation and extraterritorial persecution. The armed forces had the authority to violate the sovereignty of other states and detain and disappear people. Children were part of these repressive operations: babies born in captivity were taken by the military through a systematic plan of theft, and some children were kidnapped with their parents and transported to other countries, changing their identities. That is, children were also “war spoils” for the dictatorships. Therefore, we cannot explain the exile of children outside of these dynamics.

The repressive dynamics impacted on the children of exile, but they were hidden by the dictatorships and later overlooked by the narratives of the transitions. However, some actors of the time identified these connections and wove an underground memory about them. In Argentina, the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (Center for Legal and Social Studies—CELS) emphasized that the dictatorship’s violence was aimed at the entire family, as the construction of the “internal enemy” did not only target militants but extended to the broader social and family networks in which they were embedded. As they characterized:

An entire family is exterminated because one of its members is linked or potentially linked to subversion. It matters little if the others are not responsible for subversive actions, or even if they are not involved in any militancy. They belong to a prominent family within the ranks of the “enemy.” Their disappearance will be an exemplary sanction for the rest of society (CELS, 1982: 13).

For the CELS specialists, entire families had been the target of state repression in various forms. In families where there were disappearances or political prisoners, there were also children who suffered other forms of violence, such as exile. The CELS reports included lists of family members affected by the numerous acts of violence. Thus, exile was part of several human rights violations that were difficult to dissect into separate parts. The exile of children was also the result of resistance strategies that some relatives were able to implement to save their lives if their parents were detained or disappeared.

Alongside this, in his famous book El Estado Terrorista Argentino (The Argentine Terrorist State) lawyer Eduardo Luis Duhalde pointed out that violence was directed toward the family as an entity. Through various practices—such as the kidnapping of children and relatives and the torture in the presence of the detained people—the Argentine dictatorship sought to spread terror throughout society (Duhalde, 2013 [1983]). From this perspective, the exile of families was recognized as one of the forms of repression implemented, making it clear that the displacement of children was not accidental.

Some examples can shed light on this connection between children and repression. The Bruschtein family, for example, endured the disappearance of six members and a wave of exiles originating from these experiences of persecution, death, and disappearance. One of these exiles was Laura Bonaparte, who fled to Mexico after the disappearance of her three children, two daughters-in-law, and the murder of her ex-husband. One of her sons, Luis Bruschtein, went into exile along with his wife and children. Meanwhile, Shula Erenberg, Laura’s daughter-in-law, fled with her daughter, Natalia Bruschtein, first to Uruguay and then to Mexico. Part of the Bruschtein family was thus in Mexican exile. From there, those who were children at the time grew up with these marks of violence. Natalia stated:

There are many cases of children of the missing who are also missing or were murdered, or they were given up for adoption to other people and had their identity taken away, it was a risk to be in Argentina. So yes, I was exiled, and I couldn’t grow up in the country where I was supposed to grow up (Interview with Natalia Bruschtein in Dutrénit Bielous, 2015: 126).

The idea of exile within the repressive framework allows us to affirm that it is impossible to separate our understanding of the effects of repression into types of violence. In Uruguay, for example, the research report carried out by the University of the Republic (2008) demonstrated that exile was part of the repressive strategy used by the Uruguayan dictatorship, which involved espionage and persecution actions abroad to silence international denunciations. For its part, the Servicio de Paz y Justicia de Uruguay (Peace and Justice Service from Uruguay—SERPAJ) also emphasized that the dictatorship managed to fabricate distrust, insecurities, guilt, and resentment between those who left and those who stayed. These developments impacted families, destroying their bonds and generating divisions due to the departures of their members, while others were detained in prisons or in “insilio” (SERPAJ, 1989: 363).

The memories of those who lived through exile as children are also tied to memories transmitted by adults. For example, Diego narrates in an interview that when he was 2 years old, his uncles hid him in the trunk of a car and took him to the Uruguay-Argentina border bridge, where, on the other side, his parents, who were in hiding and being pursued by the Uruguayan Joint Forces, were waiting for him (Cited in Porta, 2006: 497). This and other situations involving persecution, house raids, and imminent danger for families left marks of fear, and survival and safety strategies learned within the family unit (Porta, 2006). It is possible that Diego doesn’t remember the moment of his exile, but the story told constructs subjectivity and a sense of identity in him.

The traumatic dimension of the exile experience reappears when we observe the characteristics of the returned. However, during the transition to democracy, the children who returned with their parents did not receive public recognition. As we will see below, the few reintegration policies that were announced in the Southern Cone left these children marginalized from the most urgent public agendas and overlooked due to the stigmas and guilt carried by their parents.

The exile of the children and returns in the Southern Cone transitions

The children exiled by the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone were not protagonists of the narratives denouncing state violence. Instead, they appeared with different emphases depending on the cases and events that marked the stories of the dictatorships and the transitions to democracy.

Argentina was the first country to regain democracy. On December 10, 1983, Raúl Alfonsín assumed the presidency and initiated a process of breaking with the dictatorship’s past, aiming to condemn the violence of the past and attend to the victims of repression. In this process, exile played a minor role, and those who returned to the country had to face their returns individually. Uruguay and Chile, on the other hand, experienced their transitions a few years later, and in comparison, the democratic governments gave more importance to the return of exiles. However, this was not enough to create a public memory of the children of exile as victims of the dictatorships.

In Argentina, mental health teams were created early to assist returning children. These teams documented challenging reintegration cases involving children who returned from exile, as well as those born abroad due to their parents’ exile. All cases received psychological attention, but professionals pointed out that specific policies were needed for their integration, as they were not simply foreigners arriving in the country. Psychologists emphasized that children could have very vivid memories of the violence suffered in their homeland or could live with fears that were part of their parent’s experiences. Some children exhibited symptoms related to their birth in captivity and their exile (Lastra, 2019). Others, in turn, were connected to their parents’ experiences of imprisonment or disappearance.

The pain of exile-return for children could not be limited to migratory grief, ² but it also integrated a political dimension of damage shared by the family unit. These marks of violence were compounded upon their return to Argentine society, which failed to offer a space for listening and recognition of their exile. Thus, the Equipo Argentino de Trabajo e Investigación Psicosocial (Argentine Team for Psychosocial Research—EATIP) stated that returned children and youth suffered from the lack of belonging to their country of origin, affected by multiple moves and school changes, forcing them to readjust and endure integration conflicts with the society of their parents. “¡Siempre fui sapo de otro pozo! ³ It was hard for me to integrate on the inside. I felt insecure. I needed to build an image for the other to recognize me” (Anonymous testimony in Equipo Argentino de Trabajo e Investigación Psicosocial (EATIP), 2009: 197).

In Uruguay, the transition President, Julio María Sanguinetti, assumed office on March 1, 1985, while in Chile, Patricio Aylwin became president on March 11, 1990. In Chile and Uruguay, the exile of the children played a much more prominent role than in Argentina, thanks to the efforts of activists and the exiles themselves.

Some milestones help identify keys to the inclusion of children in the narratives of repression. Let’s begin with the Uruguayan case. In December 1983, 154 Uruguayan children embarked on a journey from Spain to Montevideo. The trip was organized by various political figures from the Uruguayan exile, with the support of Spanish organizations coordinating the children’s visit to the “little country” or “paisito.” The flight was part of the struggle and pressure strategies employed by exiles to expose the dictatorship’s violence and demand a democratic transition. Thus, the children traveled as representatives of parents who were banned from returning to Uruguay and, in other cases, as children going to visit family members imprisoned or detained for political reasons. The reception of the exiled children was etched in the memory and narratives of Uruguay’s re-democratization. With the cry “Your parents will return!” thousands of people gathered on the Montevideo waterfront and enthusiastically accompanied the transport that took the children to the headquarters of the Uruguayan bank workers’ union.

The flight of the children was a turning point in the transition, allowing exile to gain visibility as an actor with the capacity to pressure the military dictatorship. However, this experience did not mean the recognition of children as victims of repression. Their arrival expressed the absence of their exiled parents but did not acknowledge the harm the dictatorship had inflicted on their childhood.

Ana María Sosa Aldacor was part of the children’s journey and is now an advocate for preserving the memory of childhood during the dictatorship and exile. She states that the children of exile are not seen as victims in the country, and this can be explained by several factors. First, Uruguay underwent a process of withdrawal from the issue of exile during the transition to democracy, partly influenced by political party discourses that advocated for avoiding fractures between Uruguay from within and from outside, between prisoners, tortured individuals, and exiles. Then, the Amnesty Law (known as the impunity law) also played a role, in “burying” the memory of human rights violations, leaving exiles in oblivion and closing the possibility of judging the dictatorship’s crimes. Finally, the same players who lived through exile did not organize to make their experiences and the consequences of what they had lived visible.

To the second generation, it is hard for us to organize, it’s hard for us to enter the public debate, to find a common identity. We did meet, the children, the children of the journey, we met, we started from the base of the encounter and remembering a common experience (Sosa Aldacor, personal interview, February 12, 2025).

In the Chilean case, there are also landmarks related to the return of children from exile, although, in this case, they were mostly teenagers. Here it is important to recall that the Chilean dictatorship was the longest in duration (17 years), so the youth who returned had left Chile when they were very young or had been born in their parents’ exile. Among the marks of exile memory is the creation of El Hogar El Encuentro (The Home The Encounter), a space that operated between 1985 and 1990 thanks to the activism of social organizations to receive the adolescent children who returned to the country alone, without their parents, who were still under the penalty of exile, preventing them from returning. However, this act of reception and support did not come from the state, but from social efforts to address a demand. Therefore, the memory of the reception of the returnees is characterized by distance. The narratives of Chilean children highlight the cultural shock and the conflicts faced by returnees, experiences similar to those in Uruguay and Argentina.

For the children and youth, returning to Chile meant losing both, the country they were raised in and their friends. It meant facing family disintegration, worsened by lack of work, conflicts, tensions, and parental separations. It was living with the fear of what they had heard about Chile in exile and the horrors they had seen on television news (Rebolledo, 2006: 199).

State reception policies for the children of exile in the Southern Cone were marked by “surface” policies. The primary focus was education and legal issues related to reintegration into the country. Some institutional efforts were made to alleviate school registration procedures, facilitate documentation in case children had been born outside the country, and did not have the nationality of the returning countries, as well as issues of cultural assimilation. In this last point, there were intense clashes and tensions between the children of exile and the receiving societies, as there was no comprehensive policy to raise awareness about the arrival of the children. Instead, societies showed their ignorance and distrust toward the returning children. On the one hand, they were unaware of the real reasons why these children had been born or raised abroad, and when they suspected the cause, they distrusted the parents, labeling them as “subversive” or “terrorists.” As there was no political discourse to restore the dignity of the exiles, suspicion about the exiled families prevailed.

In addition, these memories of the return of the children are inscribed in specific territories. Capital cities such as Montevideo, Santiago de Chile, and Buenos Aires had been urban spaces of intense repression during the dictatorships. Therefore, the children were integrated into schools, clubs, and neighborhoods marked by violence. In Argentina, for example, the province of Córdoba held painful memories for the returning children, however, these have not come to occupy a significant place in the social memory of the dictatorship (Parisí, 2021). In Santiago, on the other hand, the difficulties that exiled children faced in their school integration have been documented, particularly in human terms such as supporting the family trauma of a child of the disappeared who had also lived abroad due to political persecution:

I am angry with the school . . . every time I had to fill out forms, I wrote “detained-disappeared” for my father, and the administrative staff, secretaries, etc. would always ask me what that meant. (Testimony of Natalia in Pinto Luna, 2015: 208).

Those who experienced their childhoods during the dictatorships in the Southern Cone did not occupy a significant public space during the transitions. Except for Argentina—where the children of the disappeared or stolen babies were regarded as “hyper-victims” (González Bombal, 1995: 206)—the children of political prisoners or of those in exile did not have a space of their own within public narratives about state violence. In this process, the repressive dimensions of the children’s exile were obscured. The narratives of the time identified the traumatic nature of the children’s experience in return, much more related to migratory or foreign issues than to the political dimension of the repression that their families had lived through. It is worth highlighting the efforts made during the dictatorships by some organizations in the Southern Cone—such as CELS in Argentina, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity), la Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas (Christian Churches Social Aid Foundation—FASIC), and Fundación de Protección a la Infancia Dañada por los Estados de Emergencia (Foundation for the Protection of Children Affected by States of Emergency—PIDEE) in Chile, and the Servicio de Rehabilitación Social (Social Rehabilitation Service in Uruguay—SERSOC)—to shed light on the harm suffered by exiled families. However, we argue that the political roots of this experience reemerged at the turn of the century, driven by the organizing efforts of those who were once children and are now adults. The following section will focus on this new memory regime and the political subjectivation of this experience.

Political memories of the children: transition and reconfiguration

Memories merge and reconfigure. As Elizabeth Jelin (2002) points out, some memories may undergo modifications and transition toward new meanings and new public battles. The memories of the children of exile are currently in that process, which can be summarized as a shift from silence to political visibility, that is, from the margins to public denunciation. The children are, paraphrasing Jelin, entrepreneurs of a new memory of the exile.

There is a struggle between “entrepreneurs of memory,” who seek social recognition and political legitimacy of a (their) version or narrative of the past. And who also care about keeping social and political attention visible and active regarding their project. (Jelin, 2002: 49).

The efforts that children have made to organize into public groups shed light on this more general process. Of the three countries analyzed, only Argentina and Chile created formal organizations for the children of exiles. The first one in 2006 and, the second in 2017, almost 10 years later. Uruguay, on the other hand, despite having had the children’s journey, does not currently have a group of this nature.

The Agrupación de Hijas e Hijos del Exilio de Argentina (Daughters and Sons of the Exile from Argentina) emerged within the context of a new memory regime—understood as a framework of meaning about the past that is built upon certain shared agreements and can establish a hegemonic narrative of what occurred. For example, the Nunca Más report in Argentina helped inaugurate, during the democratic transition, a distinctive memory regime that prioritized the narrative of forced disappearance and condemned the crimes committed by the dictatorship (Crenzel, 2008). In the case of the children of exile, as previously noted, this new framework of meaning can be temporally situated during the presidency of Néstor Kirchner. One of the first audiovisual productions about the children of the exile was Argenmex by Violeta Burkart Noé, a Mexican-Argentine born in the exile of her parents in Mexico. She recalls that it was during Néstor Kirchner’s government in 2004 when she attended the opening ceremony of the former clandestine center of the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (Navy Mechanics School—ESMA), that her need to organize was awakened. At that event, speakers from the generations of children of the disappeared, the imprisoned, and some adults who had been appropriated as children spoke, but there was no representation of the children of the exile. “And right then I said: I have to do it because no one is telling this story.” (Burkart, personal interview, July 20, 2017).

A year later, Violeta participated, along with other children, in a meeting convened by some parents to discuss a proposed law for the reparation of the exile. Although this law was never passed, the meeting held at the Bauen Hotel in Buenos Aires allowed the children to recognize themselves as a collective with their distinct significance and identity. For her, the subsequent formation of the group marked the beginning of their own narrative, “our narrative.”

We lived listening to the stories of the elders and repeating them. When you take ownership of it, when you are the protagonist, when you speak, you build, deconstruct, and find all the contradictions, but it’s your own story. (Burkart, personal interview, July 20, 2017).

Thus, the organization Daughters and Sons of the Exile from Argentina emerged on the 30th anniversary of the coup d’état in 2006. Its emergence was late compared to other organizations like Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS), which brought together the children of disappeared persons and political prisoners in the country, although it was pioneering regarding other exiles in the region. This organization’s narrative was groundbreaking because it highlighted that exile was an integral part of State Terrorism.

We were born or grew up in another country due to the State Terrorism imposed in Argentina in the 1970s. Our parents were political prisoners and had to go into exile because their lives and ours were in danger. From a young age, we suffered the consequences of a systematic extermination plan that imposed an economic-political model, leaving a legacy of social exclusion, inequality, and impunity. Exile is a violation of Human Rights that violently breaks the right to live and grow freely in your own land and close to your loved ones. You are forced to leave the country, there is no choice. ⁴

The political narrative of denouncing exile was also accompanied by a need to gather and share their experiences, in other words, to build a shared memory. For example, Isabel Burgos notes that she joined the organization Daughters and Sons of the Exile from Argentina because she was “eager” to search for her identity, for everything she did not know before about her history.

For me, what’s important is to search, search, search, and to pass it on to my children. And not repeat it, right? Not unconsciously repeating the traumas, I mean, with traumatic processes . . . And then I realized many things needed to be brought out, spread, turned around, shared (Burgos, personal interview, June 5, 2017).

Almost a decade later, the children of the Chilean exile gathered in Santiago. In 2018, they legally formed Hijas e Hijos del Exilio Chile (Daughters and Sons of the Exile Chile), starting like the Argentines, as a cathartic meeting, of mutual recognition and presentation to society. This is how Leonor Quinteros, a child exiled in Germany, remembers it—as a massive therapeutic gathering where the goal of the meeting was not clear. She states that, in the face of the silence imposed by Chilean society, it was her generation that had to reconstruct what had been broken (Quinteros, personal interview, March 6, 2025). From that meeting, it is possible to observe that the organization’s internal narrative began to consolidate a political demand. In the words of Carmen Muñoz:

We believe it’s essential to contribute and occupy a space in the defense of human rights in Chile, from the lived experience with exile and return, as a violation of human rights, which we believe has not been recognized or repaired by the Chilean state. ⁵

María Virginia Rojas Quiroga, a member of the Chilean collective, remembers that 2016 was a key year because the Museum of Human Rights in Santiago raised the issue of exile and gave it greater visibility. That year, the Third Political Exile Conference of the Southern Cone was also held, thanks to a collaborative effort between various Argentine universities and the Museum of Memory. Placing an airplane staircase in the middle of the building’s esplanade was a symbolic and political gesture acknowledging the recognition of exile and children.

Virginia highlights that the group Daughters and Sons of the Exile Chile has a strong communication component that allowed it to gain visibility on social media. Through the hashtags #exilionuncamás and #exilioviolaciónalosderechoshumanos, they were able to run campaigns to build a public agenda.

However, new portrayals that challenge the meanings of exile are not without conflict. In Chile, various topics were discussed that, in some way, are similar to what the generations in other Southern Cone countries went through:

In the group, some are children of the detained-disappeared and had lived in exile, but they identified as children of the detained-disappeared, not as children of exiles. So, this whole discussion of, let’s say, who can be more of a victim. At one point, paradoxically, this was one of the discussions: well, should we identify as victims or not identify as victims in the group? There was a group that said yes, it was important to identify as victims because we were victims. And because exile was a violation of human rights and we were the children of exiles, and therefore we were exiled. But others said no, they were born abroad, so they weren’t exiled, they were exiled here because they were brought here. This is crucial as it helps shape the organization’s identity (Rojas Quiroga, personal interview, February 19, 2025).

In Uruguay, on the other hand, there is no specific group for the children of the exile. Instead, memory has been anchored in the story of the 1983 flight and other spaces of remembrance such as the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Some Uruguayan organizations like Memoria en Libertad (2024, Memory in Freedom) include the voices of exiles alongside other children who were repressed in prison or whose parents disappeared. In this regard, Ana María Sosa Aldacor believes that Uruguayan society still owes a debt regarding the memories of the children of exile, with recognition that has been slow to arrive.

To claim that exile is a violation of human rights is a novelty. In none of the Southern Cone countries did state policies provide public recognition that fully compensated the exiles, let alone their children (Lastra, 2016). In this context, these memories shift from a secondary or marginal space to a central position as victims of dictatorial violence which is a significant political event that can influence both the interpretation of the past and the struggles of the present.

These memories now seem to be coalescing in efforts of regional coordination. For example, in October 2024, under the title “First meeting of daughters and sons of exile from the Southern Cone: meanings and debates of memory,” the event took place at the Center for Cultural Cooperation in Buenos Aires. There, organizational experiences from different countries were shared, and various performances about silence and memory were presented. In addition, at the end of this article, the book Sapos de otro pozo (Frogs from Another Pond) was published, coordinated by the group Daughters and Sons of the Exile from Argentina (2025), which brings together around 100 texts by adults from across South America who spent their childhood in exile, some of whom never returned. ⁶ As seen, these topics continue to be central to the narratives of those who spent their childhood in exile. But they also demonstrate that through organization, they can contest the political nature of their exile, beyond the exile experienced by their parents. Although it is unclear which direction these memories will take, a significant change in these new times is discernible.

Conclusions

This article aimed to analyze the shifts in meanings of the memories of the children of exile in the Southern Cone. To do so, it began by identifying the secondary and marginal position that the experiences of the children had in the exile narratives and proposed that the repression of the dictatorships was directed at families and children in general.

Throughout this process, it showed how the memories of children’s exile underwent a shift within the exile narrative, leading them to emphasize the political nature of their exile. In that process—which is still ongoing—various factors played a role: the silence of the parents regarding the exile they lived, the stigmas and criminalization by the societies of origin toward the returnees, the encounters many had with others in similar situations of expatriation and return, and the rise of a new generation of repression victims where the exiles had no clear place. In the 21st century, organizations of children of exiles were established in Argentina and Chile, and in all three countries, there has been a proliferation of artistic and academic productions reflecting on these experiences. All these aspects feed into a new memory regime that is emerging about these exiles, and some organizations carry it as a flag: exile is a violation of human rights.

Consequently, we can consider that we are witnessing a process of political subjectivity in relation to the memories of exile from the perspective of children. These turns in the memories may contribute to rewriting the experience of those who were children within broader political frameworks, where politics is not only defined by the militancy of the parents but also by the role they had as victims of state repression. As with other transitional experiences, these memories have no predefined path or a destination.

In this process of subjectivation, those who experienced childhoods shaped by exile are now leading social struggles for the public recognition of exile as a mechanism of State Terrorism and for their role as agents of a memory that remained silenced for a long time. In this way, their identities are also in a continuous process of construction—both in terms of their place within the field of victims of the dictatorships and in terms of their sense of belonging to their countries of origin and to the countries where they lived in exile. Although this article did not aim to explore identity in depth, we believe that these forms of association and organized struggle by the children of exile may influence how they represent themselves as a collective.

Finally, this article has shown that regional approaches to social memory are crucial for recovering the bridges and connections between shared histories. However, a regional perspective also requires us to redirect our questions toward the unique components of each memory process and the specific strategies of struggle that, in this case, may differ across the various organizations of children of exile. As noted earlier, social memories speak not only about the past but also about the present. For this reason, it is important to consider the contexts in which these memories are produced and how they express distinct struggles. This becomes particularly evident in the current political climate of the region, marked by strong denialist tendencies, and especially in Argentina, where the government of Javier Milei promotes policies of forgetting the past and repressing anything perceived as left-wing. The children of exile are also active within this context. This article, therefore, invites us to pay close attention to this ongoing process.