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Abstract
In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 865–880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. “Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life.” Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496–505.] and to consider the spatial–territorial dynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. “‘In the Heart, There's Nothing’: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory.” Transactions of the IBG 38 (4): 572–585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students' understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper shows that although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. “Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope.” Space and Culture 11 (2): 81–92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year's in-depth qualitative research, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youth subjects caught between parents' experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs, status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments of modern historical ‘events', as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least in contexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Patricia Richards, Craig Jeffrey, Amalia Pallares, and the audience at the 2014 Latin American Studies Association conference for comments on earlier versions, as well as two anonymous reviewers and Peter Kraftl for close reading and editorial suggestions.
Notes
1. Nationally, over half of Mapuche youth are second-generation urban migrants, living in a time of intense globalised connectivity, and historically high numbers are enrolled as university students (see Terwindt Citation2009).
2. A small literature exists on indigenous secondary and university students' residential homes (hogares) and their politicization, radicalization and autonomous organisation (Flores and Robles Citation2008; Reuca Neculmán Citation2010; Bengoa and Caniguan Citation2011). Today, 13 hogares with 412 places for indigenous students exist in southern Chile, the region with the highest concentration of Mapuche (see Marimán Citation2008).
3. However, these pupils were not entirely consistent, and express less confrontational views on other occasions.
4. All materials are translated from Spanish by the authors. Young people are identified by number, and focus group (F), gender and age.
5. Mapuche in their teens, twenties and thirties (a broad definition of youth widely accepted in Chile) have been central to indigenous rights struggles from the early twentieth century (Foerster and Montecino Citation1988; Crow Citation2010; Webb and Radcliffe Citation2013).
6. Labelled ‘martyrs' of the Mapuche nation, they are memorialised; for example, a stone in a Santiago park was painted after Matías Catrileo's death ‘with your blood, the Mapuche Nation is reconstructed'.
7. For example, P1F4, P3F6, P5F9, P5F11, P1F30.
8. For example, P3&4, F26, P3, F28.
9. For example, P6F20, P1&5F21, P4F22, P3F28.
10. Mapuche political leadership by contrast emphasises the importance of rural communities in the reproduction and valorisation of cultural practices, language and struggles for autonomy. In such communities, young people would be expected to acquire knowledge critical of existing forms of citizenship and repertoires of protest (cf. Lazar Citation2010; Course Citation2011 on Bolivia).
11. None of the case study schools were in ‘hot-spots' of Mapuche protest in the Araucanía, as an inadvertent result of our selection criteria (high Mapuche enrolments, large intake areas and the possibility of comparisons between standard national curriculum, and intercultural bilingual education establishments).
12. Average years of schooling among Mapuche 16–29-year-olds were 1.2 years lower than national means of 11.1 (INE Citation2002; cf. Harris, Wyn, and Younes Citation2010 on Australian young people's political disenchantment).
13. Surnames are now used to award multicultural grants. Mapuche groups historically placed much emphasis on lineage (surname) and blood in determining ethnic identity within and outside the group, and hence individualization is not entirely a western imposition.
14. For example, P1,F19; P1,F21; P3,F30.