I remember you, Amanda
the wet street
run to the factory
where Manuel worked
“The songs – says Amanda Jara, daughter of singer-songwriter Víctor Jara – take their own journey.”
“I Remember You, Amanda,” possibly one of the Chilean artist’s most remembered and covered songs, was released a long time ago.
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It traveled from England, where Jara composed it in 1968, to the Chilean countryside, where the singer grew up poor with his parents Amanda and Manuel.
He traveled through Santiago, where he lived with his wife Joan and their daughters, visited the worker’s factory, like Amanda in the story, and went to the mountains, like his Manuel.
It crossed the borders of Chile and -foreshadowing- he anticipated the darkness that would bring Augusto Pinochet’s coup to overcome time and arrive today, 50 years after his brutal murder, in his beauty and strength.
Víctor Jara died on September 16, 1973, just five days after the military uprising that overthrew Salvador Allende and ended his life.
They killed him with 44 bullets after days of torture at the Chile stadium that now bears his name. His executioners They destroyed his face and his hands: “Now I want to see you play these beautiful songs, son of a bitch,” they said to him.
However, the dictatorship failed to silence his voice.
Songs transformed into hymns such as “The Right to Live in Peace,” “A desalambrar,” “El arado,” “El cigarrito” or “Plegaria a un labrador” continue to be heard from new throats in both Chile and the United States rest of Latin America or on the other side of the Atlantic, in Spain, because, as he himself wrote in “Manifysto”, “A song that was brave will always be a new song.”
And perhaps more than any other, “I Remember You Amanda,” a tender love story and a political song denouncing exploitation and oppression, embodies the spirit of Víctor Jara.
Life is eternal in five minutes…
“I Remember You, Amanda” is the story of a couple in love. “It’s about the love of two workers, two workers of today, who you see on the street and who you sometimes don’t notice. what exists in the souls of two workers in a factoryin every city, everywhere on our continent,” he explained in one of his last concerts.
These two workers are no one in particular, and yet they could be anyone. His parents’ names were Amanda and Manuel. And also his daughters Manuela and Amanda.
Víctor Jara assured that his roots lay in “folk song” and he developed a socially committed work. (VÍCTOR JARA ARCHIVE).
“Many of my father’s songs have roots, like an anchor, and often they have to do with his own life, with his experiences, with worries and joys… They are very personal and at the same time very universal“, Amanda Jara, daughter of the singer-songwriter, tells BBC Mundo from Chile.
When her father wrote “I Remember You Amanda,” he was far from his family. His other passion, theater directing, had taken him on tour throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, and it was there, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, that he received news from his wife Joan that his young daughter, the was just three years old. When she was a year and a half old, she was diagnosed with diabetes.
“In the lyrics of this song they connect many ideas, ideas of my father with his past and his identity, speak of a future and a love commitment as a couple, but also of Love for many life beliefs. “Also, there is the factory, there are the mountains… So I think that in a way this song touches nerves that go beyond the Chilean identity or even a revolutionary identity,” explains Amanda herself.
For Chilean journalist Freddy Stock, “I Remember You, Amanda” is a foreboding song that speaks of love beyond loss, and also one of the most profound and beautiful that the singer-songwriter has written: “Víctor, although he is a celebrity was a communist and a convinced fighter, Many of his songs, even the most ideological ones, were born out of love. He was a person who wrote out of love.”
Víctor Jara’s songs such as “The Right to Live in Peace” continue to be heard at protests and demonstrations, as was the case during the 2019 social outbreak in Chile. (Getty Images).
Who went to the mountains…
If love was his driving force, the social commitment of his work has its roots in what he himself called “the song of the people”.
Víctor Jara was born into a farming family in central Chile and grew up surrounded by music. His mother, Amanda Martínez, was a popular singerwho was invited to accompany with her guitar the joy of weddings and baptisms, but also the sadness of funerals, especially those of children who were known as “the little angels”, explains Mario Amorós in his recent publication “Life is eternal: biography of Víctor Jara”.
His mother had a fundamental influence on his life, even though he lost her as a teenager, says Amanda Jara, who remembers that her grandmother was always present in her father’s stories, even in his songs, such as “Despedimiento de un angelito”. ” “.
The relationship with his father Manuel Jara, violent, alcoholic and absent, was much more complicated.
“The mother was everything, she was the universe, his trainer in every respect and she was his melting pot, which ultimately determined his sensitivity as an artist,” Freddy Stock tells BBC Mundo from Chile.
As was the case with many Chilean families who spent almost all their time in the countryside, the journalist explains: “The mother took over the management of the house and was everything in one: It was a mother, a father, an uncle, a brother… because the parents are missing. A lot of what Víctor is comes from his mother and the Chilean public education of the time, as opposed to what we have today, which is lost in the market.”
The folklore in which he grew up and the social commitment to the most disadvantaged shaped his work, which is of great importance Peasants, workers and oppressed, and this increasingly acquired greater political weight.
With his songs and his militancy for “Chilean-style socialism,” Víctor Jara became one of the main voices of the campaign that brought Unidad Popular and Salvador Allende to the presidency of the country.
That never hurt…
“The new Chilean song“, whose greatest representative was Víctor Jara, “was the one who gave culture and epic to the entire program of popular unity, the progressive and transformative program that the government of Salvador Allende intended,” explains Stock, who has just published a biography about it Singer-songwriter: “5 minutes. “The Eternal Life of Víctor Jara.”
During the three years that the socialist government existed, Víctor Jara dedicated his efforts to the success of the project. Was a openly militant and he put his art at the service of a cause and even tried to promote volunteer work to counteract the numerous strikes to which the opposition subjected the Allende manager with songs like “How nice it is to be a volunteer.”
“Now that we have a popular government, cultural workers have a great responsibility to fulfill,” he himself admitted in an interview in 1970. And that responsibility, that role, “was not just to sing on stage, but.” Fight for the society you live inin which he wants to leave a legacy,” says Stock.
Allende always recognized the role that culture played in his victory, and his phrase is famous “There is no revolution without songs”which he dedicated to the young artists who helped him get to the mint.
But the putschists They haven’t forgotten it either.
Víctor Jara was arrested at the State Technical University on September 12, 1973, the day after the military uprising that overthrew Allende.
He was taken, along with other teachers and students, to the Chile Stadium, which had been converted into a detention center.
As soon as he arrived, an officer recognized Victor and gave the order to a soldier: “Bring that son of a bitch here; to this, to this”. With a punch to the stomach, he dropped him to his knees and started kicking him. “So you’re Víctor Jara, the singer of pure shit? “I will teach you to sing Chilean songs, not communist ones, my son of a bitch.” The scene is described by Stock in his book, based on the testimony of another Chile Stadium survivor.
Many did not return…
Víctor Jara, an advocate of “Chilean-style socialism,” dedicated himself to the Government of Popular Unity, as seen in this demonstration in support of Salvador Allende on September 4, 1973, possibly his last photograph. (Getty Images).
Jara spent four days in the stadium, subjected to constant torture, but also had moments when he was able to find refuge in the warmth of other university friends and even secretly write his last poem: “Chile Stadium”also known as “We are 5,000”.
Eventually he was separated from the others and imprisoned in a clique with the lawyer Littré Quiroga, the national director of prisons during the Allende government. Jara was shot 44 times and Quiroga 23 times.
Victor Jara was 40 years old.
Why this anger towards a musician? For Freddy Stock it is clear: Víctor Jara had become a danger to the dictatorship. “For barbarism, beauty is dangerous. For barbarism, thinking is dangerous, and for barbarism, love is dangerous and all this was embodied in many ways by Víctor Jara,” emphasizes the journalist.
Stock is one of the many Chileans who grew up under the Pinochet dictatorship and secretly listened to Víctor Jara: “It was forbidden to listen to him, and we passed the cassettes from one to another and played guitar to Víctor as a sign of rebellion against it .” the dictatorship.” .
Víctor Jara’s grave in Santiago has become a place of pilgrimage for many music lovers and human rights defenders. (MIREYA LEYTON).
Even today, 50 years after his murder, his figure is still very present.
“My dad kind of flies alone.. “He is there,” confesses Amanda Jara, who gets emotional every time she travels through different parts of Chile, and “men or women, some old, some young and even children, tell me that they carry him in their hearts and speak: from their experience and their sensitivity to what Victor means to them. That’s great. But that’s the music, right? Music does that.”
The family sees this presence as a gift and, in a way, as compensation.
“Justice was served, in whatever way My father is anchored in collective memory“Not only in Chile, but also in Latin America,” says the author’s daughter.
The other justice, criminal justice, has come half a century too late.
On August 28, the Supreme Court of Chile confirmed the verdict in which seven soldiers were sentenced to prison for the kidnapping, torture and murder of Victor Jara and Littré Quiroga.
Raúl Jofré González, Edwin Dimter Bianchi, Nelson Haase Mazzei, Ernesto Bethke Wulf and Juan Jara Quintana, as well as Hernán Carlos Chacón Soto were convicted 25 years in prison for murder and kidnapping.
Another defendant, Rolando Melo Silva, received an eight-year prison sentence for covering up the crimes.
Chacón Soto committed suicide a day laterwhen he was about to be arrested and taken to prison.
Image of an absence: Joan and Víctor Jara with their daughters Manuela Bunster (daughter of Joan and the dancer Patricio Bunster) and Amanda (on the floor) in 1972 and the family without Víctor in 2018. (ANTONIO LARREA).
I remember you, Amanda…
“So many years have passed that it is difficult to perceive it as justice or consolation,” said the family, who see the ratification of the verdict as a sign of justice that “although the process is complex and lengthy, since the Armed Forces.” “You don’t provide any information, these crimes will be prosecuted.”
However, there are still, they admit: “many cases to be resolved and nothing is over.”
Chile, laments Amanda Jara, “continues to have difficulty having a history with common minimums”, so it is important that the Víctor Jara Foundation, founded by her mother Joan and in which her sister Manuela Bunster also participates, History continues to promote social transformation through arts and culture and now through community sport, with the recent creation of the Víctor Jara Stadium Memory Site.
“My father is like an umbrella that covers the needs of a country“I think,” says her daughter. An umbrella that was very present in the social outbreak in Chile in 2019, where “The Right to Live in Peace,” an anthem composed with the Vietnamese people in mind during the war, took on new meanings.
Like “I Remember You, Amanda,” composed from afar with thoughts of a daughter, a mother and a longed-for country, “songs are always in context,” says Amanda Jara.
“And when they leave the context, they change. “Songs take their own journey.”