Emigrante de Chile se saca el doctorado en Zaragoza al contar su historia. | Emigrant from Chile earns his doctorate in Zaragoza by telling his story.
Enlace a la noticia (COPE):
Defensa de la tesis: http://sociales.unizar.es/noticia/defensa-tesis-doctoral-programa-relaciones-de-genero-y-estudios-feministas
Emigrant from Chile earns his doctorate in Zaragoza by telling his story.
The now Doctor Mónica Díaz arrived in Spain at a very young age and never stopped fighting for her dream. Ángel Expósito and Silvia Martínez tell the story in La Linterna.
Mónica Díaz is an 80-year-old woman who lives in Zaragoza. She has spent her whole life working and looking after her three children. A totally ordinary story were it not for the fact that Mónica emigrated from Chile when she was young and now, at her age, she has just completed her doctorate at the University of Zaragoza. We are undoubtedly talking about a woman who has always pursued her dreams.
She and her husband fled Chile when the country was under the Pinochet dictatorship. The first destination of this flight was Cuba, but when they saw that the situation was not very different from the one they had in their country, they decided to leave Cuba behind with a new destination, this time Spain. "We arrived during the government of Adolfo Suárez, it happened to coincide with a time when the entrance door was a little more open, so we applied for a visa, they gave it to us and we came here," Mónica told La Linterna.
Mónica has studied several careers throughout her life. When she arrived in Spain, she started working in the world of culture as a theatre teacher and collaborated with various associations, but she wanted to continue her education. This led her to enrol in Art History at the University of Zaragoza when she was 45 years old. "I was very lucky at that time because I lived very close to the campus. I enrolled in the afternoon and, living so close, it took me very little time to come and go and that helped me a lot".
Mother, worker and student.
Surrounded by books. This is how this Chilean by birth and Maña by heart has lived her whole life. Her passion for art, culture and history has always led her to have one project after another, which is why when she finished her degree in Art History, she began to study for her doctorate. All while looking after her three children and continuing to work. "I was studying it for two years, but it didn't take off, because I was still working, I had a family at home and I didn't really get there".
"My first daughter was born when I was 24 years old, so you have a few years when you are mostly involved in child-rearing. Then, when I retired, with no family obligations, you can think about other things", Monica said. By other things she refers, for example, to the creation of the Latin American Women's Association of Zaragoza to promote their culture. At that time she realised that they were not talked about in Spain, and she realised that she could research the role of women in order to make them visible in Spanish culture. She began to write her doctorate on the role of women under Pinochet's dictatorship, and thus bring these women closer to our society.
"Women in the southern hemisphere were not represented at all, everything that happens to women in Latin America is ignored. I think I got the theme right, because it kept me motivated from the first minute to the last". Monica says that there are two lives, the one you have to live and the one in which you can decide what you really want to do, and for her, studying is part of that second life.
The journey does not end with the doctorate
People find it funny that at the age of 80 Monica has obtained her doctorate, but of course nothing in this life is free and she has been training her brain all her life. "I have never stopped studying. If you ask me to go hiking in the mountains of the Pyrenees it will cost me, but put me to study, I say it's fun and entertaining for people who like it".
Although she has always felt very connected to her roots, Mónica had never returned to Chile, and another of the things that this doctorate offered her was to return to her country to document herself, although it was not at all easy: "I had two black beasts during this doctorate. The first was the problem of computer science, the other was the lack of bibliography we have here on Latin American issues. When I went there for three months, the most important thing was to be able to interview people and visit libraries; it was very complicated because of the pandemic.
All this ended up in a thesis of more than 450 pages, "The situation of Chilean women in the face of the dictatorship". But for Dr. Mónica Díaz, the adventure continues, as she has other projects in mind, such as "taking up painting again, which I was trying to prepare an exhibition, but I couldn't combine it with continuing with the association, which I believe is doing a very worthy and meritorious job. I will not give up. That is my motto".
Link to the original article: www.cope.es/programas/la-linterna/noticias/una-mujer-emigra-chile-espana-anos-despues-saca-doctorado-zaragoza-contar-historia-20230708_2801305
Thesis defense: sociales.unizar.es/noticia/defensa-tesis-doctoral-programa-relaciones-de-genero-y-estudios-feministas
