In this excerpt of an extended interview with Tanya Harmer for Displaced Voices journal, Ana María Pelusa remembers what it was like to arrive as a refugee in Britain and how she got involved in resistance and feminist organisations here in the UK. The full interview will be published as part of a “Documenting Chile” Special Issue of Displaced Voices on 23 September.
We came to England with the clothes that we had in our back. Not even a pair of socks or not even a coat, just with the clothes that we did have, on our back…I didn't speak a word of English. I only went to five years of primary school and I got my secondary licence as a free student when I was 28 years of age…At the airport they were asking us, who are you? What do you want? But nobody could understand. So, my children said, Mummy, what did they say? And I said, they are saying that you have to go and sit down over there because it's going to take us some time to get out of here. And I say that because I realised that if my children knew that I was so lost, their own sense of security was going to be so threatened that they were going to be affected by that. So, my only way to protect them was to pretend that, yes, I understand, but you have to wait. So that's what I did, just to protect them. And I arrived here in England and I was sent to a hostel outside London in Camberley, next to Virginia Water, where Pinochet was [later under] house arrest, and my children were put in a school, they were registered at school and I was sent a couple of days, one day a week, to have some English classes. But the teacher spoke Spanish, so it was very little that I could learn.
A few months later, I was given a flat here in London. And as I say, my English was absolutely, almost non existent. I could read by then. I had learned how to read English, but I couldn't speak English and I could understand what people were saying, but I couldn't for the life of me reply properly. And I was in my flat for about eight months, feeling sorry for myself, I guess, feeling really, really depressed, because I thought about my family, my friends, my comrades and the situation that was happening back at home. And I was in a safer place and I had food on my table every day while my people back there were suffering such horrendous conditions. So, one day I was just crying in my front room and I used to talk to myself all the time. So, I said to myself, Pelusa, do you feel sorry for what is happening? Then do something! Get out of the seat and go and denounce what is happening in Chile. You don't know how to do it? Fine, find a way. But you have to get out of here and you have to do something to help our people back there.
So from that day on, I went out and I bought…Timeout magazine that had fringe meetings [listed]. In those days, all the fringe meetings were free and everywhere and they were talking about women and these women and that, etcetera. So, I decided well, I will join all these meetings about women. And I went and I listened…and I said ahh I know what they are talking about, so okay, excuse me, I want to speak. I am Chilean. And in my very broken English, I am Chilean. I am a refugee. In my country…my women are suffering because this and the other…and we need your solidarity. We need you to support us and we need you to denounce what is happening. And the women were so patient to listen because my English was absolutely...Tarzan was speaking better English than me in those days.
But that was the situation. And I started going from one meeting to another meeting to another meeting and gradually I got involved with the women’s movement. At the start, I didn't understand that as a woman I had issues myself. But gradually I started learning from going to so many meetings and from trying to link that struggle with the struggle of the women back at home and with the struggle of my people. That's how I got involved.
And then gradually we created here an organisation of Chileans that was called Chile Democrático. And I started organising the Chilean women from north to south of Great Britain and trying to discuss feminist issues with them, but at the same time trying to help them with their own issues, with their own problems, [including] personal problems with their children. They couldn't speak English, so we needed to try to find [a way to help them] speak English, and the children as well, because some of them arrived here, so they were speaking English, but they didn't speak Spanish. So we had to organise a school to teach them Spanish. And we had two schools here in London, one in the south, one in the north. One was Escuela Amanecer in the south [in Deptford]. In the north El Niño Luchin around Highbury and Islington…So that's what we did. I had to organise that because I was the chairperson of Chilean women’s Organisation, so we had to organise that.