Reading the Globe

On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a violent coup that removed Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, from office. Thousands were arrested, tortured and killed under the repressive new regime. Six-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her younger sister fled the country with their parents for a life in exile.

Five years later, when her mother and stepfather returned to South America as Chilean resistance members, Carmen and her sister’s double lives began. At 18, Carmen herself joined the resistance, plunging further into a world of terror, paranoia, and euphoria. Something Fierce takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina, and Pinochet's Chile during the eventful decade between 1979 and 1989.

Dramatic, suspenseful, and darkly comic, it is a rare account of revolutionary life and a passionate argument against forgetting.

Carmen Aguirre is a Chilean-Canadian award-winning theatre artist and author based in Vancouver, Canada. She is an Electric Company Theatre Core Artist and has written and co-written over twenty-five plays and the #1international bestseller Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter (2012 CBC Canada Reads winner), and its bestselling sequel, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution.

Her new play Fire Never Dies: The Tina Modotti Project will premiere at the 2024 Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver. She has three other plays in development across Canada. Carmen has over eighty film, television, and stage acting credits, including her Leo-nominated lead role in the independent Feature Bella Ciao!, a series regular on the showtime series Endgame, and memorable roles in Riverdale, the Sundance-winning feature film Quinceanera, and Best In Show. She can currently be seen in Family Law as Victor Garber’s ex-wife and rival lawyer, and in the upcoming season six of Virgin River playing a colleague of Doc’s.

She is the recipient of the 2011 UBCP Lorena Gale Woman of Distinction Award, the 2014 Betty Mitchell Award for her outstanding theatre performance, and was named one of the 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadians by the Canadian Hispanic Business Alliance in 2014. Carmen is a graduate of Studio 58. 

This program is made possible in part by a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.