By Lola Arias, from her play The Year I Was Born, recently produced at the Under the Radar Festival, in New York. During the performance, eleven Chilean actors presented autobiographical accounts — using old photos, letters, tapes, and other objects — of their childhood experiences under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who deposed President Salvador Allende in 1973 and ruled the country until 1990. Pinochet left office after a 1988 national plebiscite in which citizens voted to return the country to a parliamentary system.

During the coup, my mother and my uncle, members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), listened to…