Witness Citizenship: The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory1

The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state‐making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorialization: What is the role of a former concentration camp turned memorial park in Chile’s process of democratization? I argue that public memorials like Villa Grimaldi Peace Park can be important complements to the incomplete process of transitional justice in nations that have experienced grave human rights violations. Such sites provide significant forms of sociability, which I call “witness citizenship” (human rights participation, generational transmission, and other forms of civic action) that deepen the reach of democracy, especially in the social spaces where truth commissions and institutional processes have not been able to reach.