Awaiting Revolution: Performing Chile’s Hierarchies in Ernesto Orellana’s Inútiles

Abstract

In response to the 2019 social uprising in Chile that resulted in several casualties, trauma, and an eventual plebiscite where the nation decided to rewrite its constitution, scholars are tracing what led to this social outburst. This study examines Ernesto Orellana’s Inútiles (2016) to show how theater crystallized the desires and need for change prior to the estallido social of October 2019. In this sense, the play is a prelude to the uprising. As a cultural product, it dismantles the racial and gender hierarchies that have been sustaining the nation and materializes a discourse of emancipation embodied by Mapuche characters. By analyzing the hierarchies unveiled by the 2016 play along with images that emerged during and post-October 2019, this study makes the case for art as intuitive toward social change and that art can help to eradicate the oppressing powers of a nation.

Keywords:

• Ernesto Orellana
• Inútiles
• theater
• intersectionality
• queer esthetics
• estallido social
• race

Notes

1 Amanda Taub shares one slogan that traversed the protests: “It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years.” This slogan suggests that the 30 pesos rise in the cost of public transportation was the breaking point of an accumulation of inequalities. The neoliberal system, installed during the Pinochet regime, did not cede with the return to democracy. Along with the Constitution inherited from the dictatorship, the socioeconomic structure limits the state’s impact on the economy through privatization and austerity measures. Dissatisfied by the poor quality of life, the people made their voices heard. Such were the cases of the 2006 and 2011 student protests against the privatization of education and the feminist insurrection of 2018. They all accumulated collective frustration that grew in a snowball effect until its explosion in 2019. While a new constitution is being drafted, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have halted the process of social change removing protestors from the streets. As a new left-wing president, Gabriel Boric, proposes a new chapter for the political life of the nation, rampant unregularized migration, increasing crime rates, and the public’s overall distrust of the political class are all pointing to an unstable sociopolitical terrain with much uncertainty for the future of the nation.

2 On September 4th, 2022, Chile rejected the draft of a new constitution in a plebiscite. Since then, president Gabriel Boric has called on political parties to move forward with a new path to rewrite the constitution. The new process has yet to be defined by congress.

3 Ernesto Orellana is a Chilean actor, playwright, director, educator, and a graduate from the School of Theatre at the University of Chile. Most recently he has directed Cuerpos para Odiar (2015), Putamadre (2018), Orgiología (2020), Demasiada Libertad Sexual les Convertirá en Terroristas (2019), and Los Invasores (2021). Under the leadership of Teatro SUR, Orellana has written and directed Inquieto (2011), Los Justos (2014), and Inútiles (2016), among others. In 2017 the playwright was awarded the New York Theatre Workshop at the Hopkins Center for the Arts.

4 The play re-premiered in January 2017 and was staged in Heidelberg, Germany as part of the Ibero-American Theatre Festival in February 2017. My performance analysis refers to the staging I saw on January 5th, 2018 at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.

5 Their names refer to common figures within the elite of colonial Chile. They translate to the Lady, the Landlord, and the Bishop.

6 Inútiles can also be seen as an aesthetic provocation, a liminoid phenomenon that Victor Turner would define as “social critiques. . . —books, paintings, films, etc. exposing the injustices, inefficiencies and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political structures and organizations” (55).

7 For more information about this war period see “Un siglo de intenso conflicto bélico.”

8 Criollos were those of pure Spanish descent born in colonial Latin America.

9 To Verónica Figueroa Huencho, all forms of racism, expressions of indigenous exclusion, and lack of representation in the present have at their base a 19th-century exclusionary model of a homogenous single nation that does not acknowledge the rights of pre-Columbian communities (“Racismo estructural en Chile”).

10 Racismo en Chile, edited by Maria Elena Tijoux, analyzes the effects of the global migration flow that has significantly reshaped Chile in the early twenty-first century. A new influx of immigrants has not only changed the demographics of Chile, it has made evident the preexisting and normalized racism and classism towards Black people and other minorities. According to Crístian Doña Reveco, “between 2010 and 2015, immigration to Chile grew at a faster rate than anywhere else in Latin America” (“Amid Record Numbers”).

11 To Figueroa Huencho, the demands of the Mapuche vary, one being “the establishment of a plurinational state” that supports equality and not “the supremacy of one nation over the other” (“Mapuche Movements”).

12 Orellana’s play is one in an extended line of works that have approached the Mapuche from various angles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some examples include Isidora Aguirre’s ¡Lautaro! Epopeya del Pueblo Mapuche (1982), Juan Radrigán’s Madea Mapuche (2000) and more recently, Khano Llaitul’s Ka Kiñe, Ka Kiñe (2018) and Paula González Seguel’s Trewa. Estado–Nación o el espectro de la traición (2019).

13 Other interventions by CUDS’ members have tackled the contradictions that exist within sectors of society in what Fernando Blanco identifies as “continuismo elitista” since the return to democracy (98). These contradictions are part of assimilation processes by groups and sectors affiliated with the political center right and left such as the Nueva Mayoría and Fundación Iguales, an advocate for sexual diversity (Blanco 111).

14 Las Tesis (Dafne Valdés, Sibila Sotomayor, Paula Cometa, and Lea Cáceres) first performed “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path, 2019) in Valparaiso, Chile, with a major intervention on November 25, 2019 in Santiago. See https://www. youtube.com/watch?v = aB7r6hdo3W4.

15 The work of Las Tesis should be understood as emerging from a feminist movement in Chile that gained momentum 2018 questioning “cómo la producción-transmisión del conocimiento…reproduce la discriminación de género de una cultural hecha para resguardar la supremacía de lo masculino” (Richard, “La insurgencia” 117)

16 Much of the opposition toward Loncón and the Convención Consitucional has been expressed through social media in the form of digital attacks. For more see Santander M.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Graduate School, part of the Office of Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and UW-Madison.

Notes on contributors

Carlos A. Ortiz

Carlos A. Ortiz is a PhD candidate in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin–Madison specializing in Contemporary Latin American Theater and Performance. His research interests also include Latin American Literatures, Latinx Transnational Studies, Queer Studies, and Visual Cultures.