Secondhand Clothing in Chile

Let me make something clear: I am not obsessed with deserts. I wish I were. There is something admirable and exhilarating about checking places off a list. If only I could be one of those dedicated individuals who dons a water bottle or hangs a poster with all the state parks, diligently placing a sticker or commemorative mark upon visiting a location—a proverbial flag posting of sorts, fulfilling a contemporary urge to explore and conquer, albeit if only through popular swag. Yet, despite my uninspiring relationship with arid lands—distinct from the thick, green rolling foothills of the Ozark Mountain where I was raised and live—I am drawn to the 1,000-mile wonder that is the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Over the last two and a half decades, I find myself returning to the Atacama’s surprising and colorful landscape. And I am far from the only repeat offender.

In the awe-inspiring region, small towns such as San Pedro de Atacama spill over with wanderlust explorers and young hiking crowds with heavy backpacks so stuffed and tall that they threaten to teeter their wearers to the ground. Freshly scrubbed faces, ornamental dreadlocks and an array of professional hiking boots kick up the dusty soil of the narrow, albeit lively, streets. Small establishments advertise daily fare that marries local ingredients—such as quinoa and avocado—with trendy, health-conscious cuisine from far-off-lands. Other aficionados of the Atacama’s appeal include swarms of scientists. The site is a global hub for astronomy and the location of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, widely known as ALMA, the largest astrological project in existence, resulting in an international partnership amongst Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile (Harvard astronomers were among the first to use it). As we shall see, these attractions contrast with the dire used clothing waste that threatens the Atacama Desert’s unique topography.

Photo by @pommegala on Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/snLbnJ

The shocking landscape—often compared to the surface of Mars—resists monochromaticity in places such as the Valle del Arcoiris, or Rainbow Valley, with layers of muted colors forming calming arcs from mineral deposits. The region’s celebrated blooms from the Desierto Florido, burst with lavish magenta flowers every three to ten years. Color can be found everywhere. Even stylish groups of camelids—llamas, guanacos, alpacas and vicuñas—model bright ceremonious ribbons woven in their coveted wool, all while maintaining the most nonchalant of gazes.

Yet, despite these singular regional treasures, the Atacama Desert dresses recent news in the nightmare of its landscape wardrobe with used clothing mountains containing unimaginable tons of cast-off items regarded as rubbish. The images are damning. Mountains of textile waste contrast with the region’s “organic” mountain range, the Andes—resulting from tectonic plate processes versus man-made waste. The Andes Mountains provide dramatic border markers separating Chile from its neighbors while the country’s other geographic encasing, a 4,000-mile-long shoreline of the Pacific Ocean, has served as a disappearing cemetery of sorts. In 1973, ceasing power through a military coup, Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship began a period of covering up countless human rights violations: thousands of citizens were “disappeared”; others entered exile. Although put to trial in 1998 by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, released in 2000, Pinochet would never be indicted. Pinochet died in 2006, leaving a country wrestling with memory. Unlike those disappeared loved ones and, in some cases, uprooted and adopted-out children in an attempt to cover up violence and silencing, the growing mounds of discarded clothing in the Atacama Desert places on an international stage the many wrongs associated with clothing production, consumption and responsible recycling or disposal.

In Fashion, Gender and Agency in Latin American and Spanish Literature (2021), I grapple with the complicated relationship that we have with our clothing, as well as how the clothing industry does—or should—become an issue of national and global concern. While many countries in Latin America and Africa have outlawed used clothing for its interference with local industry and designers, in nations such as Chile we see that used clothing is big business, thriving alongside a rise of popularity in fast fashion.

Chile’s particular relationship with used clothing skyrocketed during the neoliberal policies ushered in with the dictatorship, as treated in the work of renowned Chilean photographer, Paz Errázuriz. In my years of pouring over decades of issues of the country’s most popular newspaper, El Mercurio, the visual changes underway—such as an increase in blonde models wearing more revealing clothing—stand out. Soon, loads of used clothing arrived, known in Chile as ropa americana, the namesake presenting a nod to the primary contributors to this culture-changing phenomenon. Calle Bandera, a street in downtown Santiago, is lined with shops selling ropa americana, many transforming into buy-by-the-kilo locales. In a warehouse style, airtight blocks of compressed clothing dress the walls of the stores from ceiling to floor. Local markets that once offered predominantly fruits, vegetables and a few knick-knacks, now host seas of stalls selling used clothing from ambulatory vendors.

Ropa americana has teetered on the critical obsessions of Chilean theorists, artists and writers for decades. Chilean cultural theorist, Nelly Richards, explores the unsettling trend of the “Frankenstein” of atemporal styles that fill bins and racks, allowing customers to fashion looks from out-of-season, out-of-country pieces. Historian Pía Montalva in Tejidos blandos (2023), delves into the politics of clothing during the dictatorship, namely the relationship of clothing and prisoners during the interrogation process. Writer and poet Pía Barros, in Ropa usada (2010), presents nine vignettes, some interlaced with hints of magical realism. The author plays with the role of memory and inheritance as found in used clothing in her first vignette in which the buyer of a leather jacket in a secondhand store rubs his hand over a bloody stain. Upon leaving the spot, his fate parallels that of the previous owner, while the secondhand shop worker scurries to collect the garment for another sale. The worker’s attitude, accompanied by her incessant and socially disconnected nail filing, perhaps forecasts the global apathy that surrounds used clothing throughout the globe. Barros’s last vignette upends a used-clothing fairytale in which the saleswoman closes the shop and dresses herself in an elegant green gown. Clothes fly off the hangers, as a motley crew of faces appear from beggars and whores to actors and dukes, reminding us of lives we give to clothing, and the stories written, however fortunate or unjust.

As Nelly Richard notes, in Chile the transgender community, particularly those celebrated as “locas” by the late essayist, novelist and performance artist Pedro Lemebel, has a marked contribution of ropa americana in Chile. Pedro Lemebel was born in 1952 in an impoverished neighborhood in Santiago, near an irrigation canal flowing into the Mapocho River. The author later chose to change his surname to that of his mother and dedicated his career to increasing the visibility—oftentimes through provocative performance art with other creative figures such as Francisco Casas—of the transvestite community, many of whom were targeted by the dictatorship or died at exaggerated rates from the AIDS epidemic.

Lemebel’s work and legacy has left a lasting mark on my career trajectory in many ways. I was fortunate to meet him in his antique-strewn apartment for tea and toast, first in 2007 and then for an unexpected birthday celebration in 2011. Lemebel’s charismatic and sharp-tongued wit spilled into his writings. So did his fashion sense that at times looked towards international inspiration, such as his recreation of Frida Kahlo’s Dos Fridas with Francisco Casas. At other times, Lemebel celebrated capital’s wintery penchant for minimalistic black with only a splash of color in the form of a simple scarf.

Pedro Lemebel and author, Santiago, Chile. May 20, 2011. Photo courtesy of Stephanie N. Saunders.

Lemebel, alongside other artists and writers resisted the dictatorship’s human rights violations towards LGBTQ+ individuals. The national reception of the writer has changed dramatically over the last few decades, albeit not without resistance. Originally fired from his position as an art teacher because of his sexuality, Lemebel’s work, receiving such awards as a  Guggenheim Foundation scholarship and the Premio José Donoso, is the focus of countless academic articles and collections, and his legacy continues to inspire trans communities. While Lemebel’s literary career resulted in but one novel, his prolific corpus exemplifies the duality of complexities in the metropolis. My research has elaborated Lemebel’s use of ropa americana in Loco afán, as a creative medium, in particular during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Lemebel’s writing employs tinges of macabre humor to create parallels between the thin and frail body of the AIDS-stricken body, and the similarly debilitated bodies required by the fashion industry. His work exposes the obsession of Western icons, with untenable fashion inspirations such as Madonna’s heavily bleached-blond tresses. Lemebel’s characters find performative inspirations in the used-clothing bins, placing a positive spin on an at-times questionable industry. My writings on Lemebel have likened the author’s characters who ravish the deceased’s secondhand clothing, with 19th-century ragpickers. I could never have imagined how Lemebel’s descriptions would foretell those who scavenge the clothing mountains of the Atacama for discarded clothing items that would allow them to piece together a precarious tapestry to make ends meet.

In Fashion, Gender and Agency, I observe that contemporary Latin American and Spanish literature celebrates the figure of the seamstresses, a historically castoff member of society in 19th-century depictions of the profession, emphasizing the economic destitute of the characters, always in danger of finding themselves in state of moral compromise. Ironically, such lewd depiction of the indispensable profession of the seamstress in many ways parallels the treatment of women employed in factory textile labor, accounting for cultures of sexual abuse and feminicides. I maintain that the empowered depictions of these figures give respectability to the profession, and in turn presents possibilities for choice and agency.

The use of textiles in Chile for protest has a long history. The famed arpilleras, or quilted tapestries, were born out of workshops in which women gathered to create elaborate pieces, oftentimes telling the atrocities of the dictatorship through their stitches. Eventually, the pieces gained global attention when they were smuggled out of the country. In another peaceful form of expression and protest, Chilean poet and artist, Cecilia Vicuña’s textile art employs centuries-old indigenous textile mediums to rally against the environmental devastations that plague her homeland. Vicuña weaves a ubiquitous red thread throughout many of her art installations and performative art works such as one including meters of a shock of crimson through the Mapocho River, linking the textile with the environment that she has dedicated her life to defending and raising social consciousness regarding the challenges it faces. Other installations appear as long red quipus, the ancient textile record-keeping knot-system of the Inca, reminding the spectator of the ancestral connections of the sources of life through the textiles that surround us.

Although Chilean artists and writers have interpreted the complexities of used clothing since its original inundation in the 70s, business owners and policy makers are increasingly joining the conversation. In the last two decades, designers, writers and artists have stepped up to engage directly with the textile waste that the United Nations deems as an emergency. In 2011, I attended the first Ropero Paula, a multi-day fashion extravaganza of fashion shows and workshops in the exclusive Parque Araucano. There I became familiar with the work of Argentine designers, Mechi Martinez and Mariano Breccia, who formed 12na (docena) in 2004 in Buenos Aires. Since then, Valparaiso, Chile, has become their center for their brand that upcycles used clothing for one-of-a-kind atemporal fashion pieces. Another clothing designer, Y.A.N.G (You Are the Next Generation) has been working since 2017 to create zero waste items out of cast-off clothing piles. Start-ups, such has as Ecocitex, found their niche through recycling, making yarn out of discarded clothing. More textile recycling plants are surely on the way. Policy involving accountability for producer and importer accountability will be next. Or so we hope. May it curb our appetite for fast fashion. May the Atacama’s shocks of color and form, coupled with otherworldly geography and astrological wonder, thrive without any restrictions—without yet one more heavy cloak of our unwelcomed waste.

Stephanie N. Saunders is Associate Professor of Spanish at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas. She is the author of Fashion, Gender and Agency in Latin American and Spanish Literature (Tamesis, 2021), and co-editor with Regina A. Root of the forthcoming book on Latin American fashion (Bloomsbury).