Between Political Worlds: Indigenous Citizenship in Chile's Alto Bío Bío

Abstract

The formation of a new municipality comprising the Mapuche–Pewenche communities of the Alto Bío Bío region in Chile offers a prime case for analysing the challenges involved in the exercise of meaningful indigenous citizenship at the local level. This work contributes to the literature on indigenous experiences with local government in Latin America, but its main goal is to re-examine notions of hybridization in the formation of indigenous subjects. While hybridity is often invoked as a successful reinvention of indigenous social and political agency, less attention has been paid to the ways in which hybridization can also be associated with less progressive outcomes. The exploration of ‘hybrid’ indigenous citizenship in the Alto Bío Bío focuses on four nested fields of institutions and socio-political cultures: property rights, community structure, economic development, and municipal government. Despite some counter-tendencies, significant agency in shaping the terms of their encounter with modernity has mostly eluded the Pewenche communities of the region.

Keywords:

• Indigenous citizenship
• local government
• neo-liberalism
• Mapuche
• Chile

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express his gratitude to the numerous individuals and organizations who participated in the research leading to this publication, as well as to the Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies editor and the reviewers for their helpful commentaries and suggestions.

Notes

Notes

[1] The census statistics on indigenous peoples are highly controversial, since a change in question posed on the 2002 census cut the number of people reporting indigenous identity almost in half. Projecting forward from 1992 numbers, the current Mapuche population of Chile would be well over one million.

[2] There are varying accounts of how the lof maps onto existing Mapuche communities in general, and the Alto Bío Bío in particular. In practice, Mapuche communities seem to be flexible in their understanding of the reach of any particular lonko's authority. Some lonkos lead single family groupings, where others head larger conglomerations consisting of several different kinship units. Morales (2002) and Ñanculef (1990) offer useful discussions of local Mapuche socio-political organization.

[3] There is a double meaning to this phrase, since ‘trato’ means both treaty and treatment. The ‘politics of new treatment’ was in this way also a way of appealing to the notion of a treaty between peoples – even if there was nothing like a treaty process involved.

[4] Although I have no figures for the Alto Bío Bío, at a national level investments in agricultural productivity accounted for 77 per cent of Orígenes expenditures over the 2004–2005 duration of phase I (Proyectos Ejecutados, 2005). The firm overseeing Orígenes in the Alto Bío Bío was a Mapuche development agency, Lonko Kilapang, whose choice to work with the programme was driven partly by financial necessity (after foreign funding dried up in the mid-1990s) and partly by the hope to use the space provided by the programme to build community capacity for more progressive ends. The staff of Lonko Kilapang were fully aware of the contradictions present in their work, and many of the criticisms I present here are the product of conversations with them during our time together.

[5] SEPADE is a national Protestant development NGO.

[6] Servicio País is a national programme for young professionals who work on a range of programmes with marginalized populations.