Life After the Fight: Labor Trajectories and Emotional Stories of the Chilean Left in the Post- Dictatorship

Abstract

This article analyzes the processes of social and political reconversion of the Chilean Left during the Post-Dictatorship period from a biographical perspective. By tracking professional and labor trajectories as well as emotional and family stories of thirty former militants of the parties that formed the Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP 1983-1987), from 1990 until today, this study discusses the main changes in the forms of political participation in the last 30 years. Drawing on contributions from sociology of the individual as well as sociology of emotions, this paper interprets the dilemma of recomposing lives after anti dictatorship struggle: the exposure of contradictions in labor and economic reconversions, alongside the emotional costs of political participation. This findings allows to affirm that militants live painful processes and conflicting identity transformations which are not explained entirely by the end of political participation or the crisis of leftist parties during the nineties. This paper claims that these are highly complex processes of identity reconfiguration that arise from the way in which the interviewees elaborate the emotions associated with political commitment and reinterpret the political and collective meanings of their fighting experiences.