Laying claims on the city: young Mapuche ethnic identity and the use of urban space in Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT

This article explores indigenous young people’s use of different types of space within Santiago’s unequally distributed opportunity structure to express cultural belonging and sense of place. Drawing on qualitative work informed by environmental psychology and critical geography, the article discusses how young Mapuche residents in Santiago elaborate practices and relations with their neighborhood, public areas and institutional space to establish ethnic identity. Although existing literature has demonstrated that non-essentialized indigenous identities and connections to land-territory are prevalent in urban spaces, attention has not been given to how these senses of belonging are situationally defined and negotiated across the city. We argue that place attachment and place identity are developed differentially and ambivalently within these contexts. That is, Mapuche indigenous youth and their households must navigate tensions between state-led action and personal agency, between politicized and quotidian identities, between “there” and “here,” and between past and present, so as to produce meaningful connections, activities, and affective relations according to distinct spatial dynamics and power relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous youth
• Chile
• place attachment
• place identity
• situational ethnicity

Introduction

In Latin America, socio-cultural, political, and representational ties to land and territory have been reconfigured by market-led legislation, processes of land-grabbing and displacement, rapid migration and urbanization, and restricted forms of autonomy. Furthermore, as socially marginalized indigenous and non-indigenous sectors of society migrate to Santiago, they engage in a continual process of mobility and communication between their origins and the city. As research shows, migrants handle multiple forms of belonging by combining new and old place attachments (Christiansen and Jensen 2012). Yet, less is known about how indigenous youth manage different spheres of “new” locations to create and maintain senses of belonging at a distance from their ancestral land-territory. The dialectic of indigenous and diasporic histories, roots, and routes in relation to experiences of post- and neo-colonial interdependence highlights the importance of these connections for ongoing indigenous positionalities (Clifford 2013). Although scholars have noted that indigeneity is itself forged in part through the large-scale forced movements associated with coloniality and modernity (Kobayashi and de Leeuw 2010; Radcliffe 2017), few have focused on contextual processes of migration and diaspora formation, which call for a deeper examination regarding its consequences for indigenous subjectivity and relations with land and territory.

Taking a non-essentialized situationist perspective on indigeneity and connections to land-territory, this article examines not only the ways different urban spaces shape young Mapuche identities, but also how they negotiated and modified place-specific meanings. To contextualize the discussion, we engage critically with the dominant narrative in contemporary debates around indigeneity, land, and generational change, which suggest younger generations are becoming less attached to indigenous group territory due to rapidly changing economic, educational, and social relations around labor, land, and aspiration. In this perspective, changing landscapes of indigenous settlement are described in terms of de-territorialization, the break-up of strong ties with original territory, and uprooting from place of birth (see Unda Lara and Muñoz 2011). In our view, this narrative offers a restricted interpretation of territorial relations, as it discounts the possibility of young peoples’ continued attachment and ongoing, albeit reconfigured, relations with land identified with the historic origin of their ethnic group. Young people and their households, in this regard, manage and navigate much more elaborate tensions between (rather than dichotomous opposites) state-led action and personal agency, between politicized and quotidian identities, between “there” and “here,” and between past and present. The analysis of intergenerational shifts in outlook and resources comes together with attention to sites across the city, ranging from kitchens and yards to urban ceremonial centers and universities, as a means of addressing situationally-specific relationships to ethnic identity. These sites are not uniformly experienced by all participants, but rather constitute spaces with different power relations that affect the salience of ethnic identification. We focus on the situationally variable and negotiable nature of ethnicity in these spaces, and in particular where and when this becomes salient or important to collective membership (Jenkins 1997).

We suggest that Mapuche youth in Santiago produce urban spaces from “below” and create indigenous-identified attachments to the urban arena, conditioned always by a marginal position in unequal relations of postcolonial power. As we detail further below, place-specific meanings are continuously negotiated, revealing elements of place identity that become tied to ethnic enclaves in urban sites (Mazumdar, Docuyanan, and McLaughlin 2000), and such negotiations take place within discourse interaction and narratives about migration (Merino, de Fina, and Becerra 2017). A situationist account of ethnic identity formation recognizes that the salience of belonging is not universally experienced, but rather obeys contextually-defined opportunity structures that are simultaneously constraining but also enabling (Fenton 2003; Jenkins 1997). Indigeneity is thereby worked out within micro-geographies; embodied acts and affective meanings attributed to specific landscape features create urban identification and place-production, but the range of contexts in which these occur is always delimited by political power relations. The article documents the provisional ways in which Mapuche urban ethnic identity, situational identity, and place attachment have emerged in public and semi-public cultures and practices, where younger generations play an active – if not central – role.

Place attachment, place identity, and situated identities

Since the early 1990s, social science literature has amply demonstrated that contemporary media and transportation have created new image spaces and cultural identities by decreasing the limitations imposed by distance (Appadurai 1990; Massey 1994; Morley and Robins 1995). Gupta and Ferguson summarize the particularities of this modern phenomenon in the following way:

At a time when cultural difference is increasingly becoming de-territorialized because of mass migrations and transnational culture flows of a late capitalist, postcolonial world … there is obviously a special interest in understanding the way that questions of identity and cultural difference are spatialized in new ways. The circumstances of an accelerating “global cultural ecumene” … make the project of exploring the intertwined processes of place making and people making in the complex cultural politics of the nation-state an especially vital part of the contemporary anthropological agenda. (1997, 3)

Part of this thesis is that assumptions about bounded, authentic, and essentialized identities to a homeland must be transcended by fluid, interchangeable, and hybrid conceptions. Morley and Robbins, for example, argue there can be “no recovery of an authentic cultural homeland. In a world that is increasingly characterized by exile, migration and diaspora, with all the consequences of unsettling and hybridization, there can be no place for such absolutism of the pure and authentic” (1995, 20). For postcolonial geographers, hegemonic visions and imagined geographies that position an “authorized” or “correct” place-based identity contrasted with “displaced” ones are problematic, since the two geographies co-exist and compete to become the dominant imaginary. The nature of these imagined geographies and lived geographies is plural, hybrid, and incomplete, due to the material embodied and multifaceted dimensions of geographical imaginations.

In fact, these conceptions of identity and place do not signify an end to desires to be “at home” in locally-situated and meaningful spaces. As social psychology literature has demonstrated, individuals do not seek to be out of place, nomadic, or incomprehensible, but rather coherent, reflexive, and understood; to situate themselves within local settings, and to belong to communities (Callero 2003). In this respect, environmental psychology posits that place identity is a collective construction produced and modified through dialog that allows people to make sense of their located-ness, and to make place into a resource for action that grounds individual identity. Furthermore, place identity may become dynamic arenas, socially constituted and socially constructed through discourse, allowing people to create a sense of belonging in new spaces, legitimizing their social relations and practices through rhetorical-discursive resources (Dixon and Durrheim 2004; Dixon, Durrheim, and Di Masso 2014). These authors agree that place identity not only looks to the ways landscapes and their socio-cultural meanings influence people’s behaviors, identities, and group norms, but also how the agency of individuals can re-shape and enact upon those existing landscapes.

Place identity and place attachment are intimately related. This latter points to a socially-produced and contingent set of practices and meaning-creation, through which subjects come to create psychological stances and embodied acts (Gustafson 2014; Mihaylov and Perkins 2014; Thompson Fullilove 1996). Familiarity with an environment, an affective connection, and psychological investment in a setting are ways in which individuals make their immediate environment into part of a regulated self (Korpela 1989; Proshansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff 1983; Rowles 1983; Vaske and Korbin 2001). Within this perspective, place identity, as part of a psychological structure only partially conscious, can only be identified as action through the discourse of individuals (Edwards 1997; Edwards and Potter 1992; cited in; Dixon and Durrheim 2000). Consequently, to reveal an individual’s place identity, it is necessary to discern the attachment of the individual to a particular place (Dixon and Durrheim 2000). This requires revealing, on the one hand, whether there is behavioral commitment of the person with the place (Pretty et al. 2003), and, on the other hand, a sense of community among neighbors of the same physical, social, or geographic space. In other words, the space and activities that are developed in it have some practical, emotional, or recreational utility for the person (ibid.).

Furthermore, place identities are regularly developed within socially-constraining contexts, which delimit the possibilities of participation, according to power relationships and access to material resources. Forced migration, segregated residency, low-income households, and lack of educational opportunities are just some of the spatially constraining aspects of everyday life for the respondents in our study. These aspects may demarcate and infringe upon the possibilities of developing ethnic identity as seen from a static, unitary all-embracing self, but we seek to show that ethnicity is worked out in place-specific contexts, as a “local liveability, that is, the micropolitics of everyday social contact and encounter” (Amin 2002, 960). For this reason, situationalism, as a long-standing tradition in ethnic studies, emphasizes the importance of context in defining which identity categories can be constructed and when they become salient in relation to others (Banks 1996). In this way, we can conceptualize young people’s creation of place meanings, which produce more fluid and incomplete ethnic affinities.

Studies of how young people negotiate these dynamics suggest that, despite being a marginalized population, they seek out place-based participation through “youthscapes” (Maira and Soep 2004) in which they can forge meaning-making, cultural productions, and social engagement in less official spaces (Hall, Coffey, and Williamson 1999; Wood 2014). Rather than viewing youth as in-transition to adulthood, or as having incomplete identities, we follow other literature in emphasizing their purposeful agency to transform spaces and create new landscapes of participation (Skelton and Valentine 1998). This is especially relevant for efforts to interrupt the dominant interpretative trope about urban indigenous young people becoming less attached to group territories.

Literature specific to the Chilean case indicates that, despite clear identifications with place and land-territory, Mapuche currently experience significant processes of up-rootedness and disconnection from the parts of “earth” where Mapuche attachment to land has greatest historic depth (Bello 2012; Bengoa 2003`underlineb`/underlineb; Curivil 2007; Cárcamo-Huechante 2013; Grebe 2000; among others). Furthermore, this re-articulated connection to land-territory is often associated with inter-generational distinctions, as older generations are seen as more attached to Mapuche culture and territories, whereas younger age groups are influenced by de-territorialized values and globalization practices (see Durán de Alba 2010; Radcliffe 2015). To date, analyses of urban Mapuche youth have focused on the culturally hybrid practices aimed at politicizing indigenous demands through re-articulations and re-significations of hip-hop, punk, graffiti, social networking, and artwork (Azkintuwe 2010; Imilan 2009). Several constructs, Mapurbe (mapu-land), Warriache (waria-city) have sought to authenticate these urban identities along different lines to those of traditional (Ancán Jara 1997; Aravena 2003).

This article contributes to the above literature by examining the relevance of different spaces that enact upon but are also transformed by the young people, and how such spaces contribute to Mapuche youth’s place attachment and place identity within urban context. Although the cultural work of Mapuche youth is well documented, the significance of the spaces in which such practices occur has been somewhat understudied. In this regard, greater attention needs to be given to how national, urban relations of power, territory, and hierarchy shape the ways and places in which Mapuche urban youth express indigenous identifications and forge their cultural identity in everyday urban contexts. Our interviews and family focus groups evidenced a complex landscape of insecurity and its effects on ethnocultural senses of territorial attachment, yet also evidenced avenues through which indigenous young people seek to lay claims on the city as urban indigenous residents, strengthening cultural identity by place identification with local features; both private and public.

Context and methods

The article draws on qualitative research undertaken in comunas (districts demarcated by municipalities) in Santiago, Chile’s capital city, some 700 km north of Mapuche communities where their much-reduced historic and ancestral territories remain. The majority of migrant Mapuche families in Santiago live in (or in close proximity to) four comunas: Peñalolen, La Pintana, Cerro Navia, and Lo Prado, each of which has had a Mapuche majority since the 1970s (Gissi 2004a). These comunas now comprise some of the capital city’s poorest and most marginal districts, characterized by overcrowding, poor housing quality, few employment opportunities, and high levels of air pollution (Bello 2012; Bengoa 2000; Gissi 2004b). Chain migration linking family members from the South with historically-established residence in these four comunas has resulted in continued urban ethnic spatial segregation, despite later migration from other Latin American countries, and the presence of non-indigenous residents.

According to an earlier Census, diverse self-identified indigenous populations make up around 10 per cent of Chile’s total, while nine in every 10 indigenous people are Mapuche; furthermore, the Mapuche population is 958,000 of a total of 17 million (INE 2002). Mapuche people are today predominantly urban, with around 350,000 living Santiago, and a further 230,000 based in the Araucanía region, and 150,000 based in the Bío-Bío region. Southern Chile is an indigenous frontier area incorporated into Chile during the 19th century through militarized settler colonialism. Araucanía and Bio-Bio are currently the “heart” of territorial disputes between Mapuche and various landowners and forest companies (Cayuqueo 2012; Mayol 2012).

Research results presented here derive from two research projects, both working with Mapuche young people in these neighborhoods. In the first study, semi-structured interviews and family focus groups were conducted in four of Santiago’s Mapuche- majority comunas, giving a total of 12 focus groups and 36 in-depth semi-structured conversational interviews. In the second project, life-history interviews (Pillow 2003) were conducted with Mapuche university students (or recently graduated students) who resided in these comunas.

In the first project, interviews and focus groups were undertaken by the Mapuche co-author of this article, following the Mapuche introduction protocol (pentukun) in Mapuzungun language. Interviews were undertaken in Mapuzungun and Spanish in family houses and patios, generating a total of 60 biographic narratives. Families were selected through a snow-ball technique to find self-identified Mapuche in three-generation households. Sampling was purposive and indicative, undertaken in collaboration with Mapuche organizations in the comunas. Selection criteria ensured that at least one older household member had migrated to Santiago. Households comprised individuals with diverse educational achievements (elementary, secondary, university and/or technical) and varied work activities (professional, technical, employees, self-employed, unemployed).¹ Additionally, participant observation and photos were recorded of neighborhood landscapes, primarily of places mentioned in interviews and focus groups.

In the second project, the objective was to understand how indigenous students frame and give meaning to their educational pathways, and to uncover structural mechanisms of inequality common among the sample. The doing of telling lives is an act of conveying both personal and institutional meanings that position individuals within particular social hierarchies (Freeman 2010). Given that the principal investigator of the second project is white and non-Chilean, power asymmetries were a concern given irresolvable social and cultural differences with the respondents. However, age differentials between the researcher and students were not large, and 10 years prior research experience working with Mapuche youth meant being open to observing indigenous greeting customs when initiated by the participants (which occurred on two occasions) and understanding enough vocabulary in Mapuzungun (Mapuche native language) to be able to engage in conversations about traditional forms of knowledge, customs, Mapuche organizations, and identity.

The article focuses on the positionality of Mapuche young people living in Santiago comunas with large shares of indigenous, mostly Mapuche, residents. These young people, mostly in their twenties and thirties² do not maintain a continuous direct relationship with Mapuche ancestral territory in the south of the country, but indigenous identity and place-attachment and the colonial-modern constructions of space are expressed in a series of domains and at various scales. To examine the dynamics of place attachment and its effects on ethnic identity construction, we employed discursive analysis from a social constructionist framework. In particular we draw on social interactional approach by De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012) who argue that oral narratives are solid discursive practices that speakers use as talk in interaction to display their identities. We analyze narratives as emerging within interviews and which may take many different forms that to be investigated in concrete occasions of interaction and as fundamentally grounded in concrete storytelling exchanges (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012).

Results

Residential spaces

A key site for developing place-identity is the home, in as much as for many people it transmits feelings of security and enables young people to develop culturally, socially, and historically enriching identities (Chow and Healey 2008). In some cases, cultural identity and belonging can be lost in these environments, particularly where socialization is not founded on traditional indigenous practices, knowledge, or language; hence, the objective of this section is to avoid over-idealizing this space. The narratives analyzed underscore how, despite dangerous surroundings, limited housing options, cramped living conditions, and poor connectivity, the home is a space in which micro-geographies of cultural community can forge place-identity.

Youth (and adult) place identities are shaped not only by neighborhood socio-political, cultural, and historical relations, but also by institutional power relations of state housing for economically vulnerable indigenous and non-indigenous immigrants. These intertwined relations differentiate and regulate space, and consequently shape socioeconomic stratification in Santiago’s different communes, which have especially difficult consequences for the young people involved in the study. Parents and grandparents of the Mapuche youth who had arrived in Santiago as migrants, in the majority of cases were allocated housing in specific localities by the government often after a period of dwelling in campamentos.³ In Santiago’s still highly-segregated neighborhoods (Bello 2012), young peoples’ development of place-attachment is sometimes compounded by feeling insecure in their comunas’ streets. These constraints were ever-present in the young people’s narratives as they must daily negotiate their place attachment and sense of community with delinquency and drug trafficking.

According to interviewees, neighborhoods such as Cerro Navia are strongly associated with high levels of street-level practices of alcoholism, drug addiction, and drug trafficking. Below we provide examples from an interview and a family focus group, in which two cousins residing in the same house participated:

I was born here in Cerro Navia. I lived with my parents here, like I told you before; I didn’t choose to live here. When we were younger, it was quite a quiet neighborhood [with state housing areas]. We were living in a place where we could go out onto the street, where there were no problems. Today, it’s not the same; it’s dangerous now [drugs, delinquency]. If you were to ask me if I want to live in Cerro Navia, no – I would go to live in another place and feel more protected. (Female, 27, Cerro Navia)

In the following extract of the focus group, the family is discussing about their living experiences in the comuna:

Respondent 1: The thing is that I was born here in Cerro Navia so … I did not choose [it], they chose for me ha ha ha [implying her parents’ choice]

Interviewer: and is there anything special for you in Cerro Navia?

Respondent 1: What could it be? I mean I think that here in our home, here it is special, yeah I think that’s the most special ‘cause our family is here, yeah it’s true, it’s our family ‘cause we live together.

Respondent 2: that’s the only reason, the only one ‘cause here there is too much delinquency, alcoholism, and drugs, it’s very dangerous to walk in the streets by your own. (Respondent 1, female, 29; Respondent 2, female, 30 Cerro Navia)

In both cases, the young respondents emphasize their lack of agency or choice when facing their surrounding conditions. There is a distinct dis-association from the comuna, temporally and as a source of place attachment, whose values and activities stand opposed to those of their family, and whose risks must be managed on a daily basis. Specifically, these spaces pose hazards and uncertainty for the individual. Instead, as noted through the narrative of the female participants in the focus group, the embodiment of living together as a family is what counters this, and therefore place attachment is consolidated. Identifying with space is therefore achieved relationally (Massey 2005). As we discuss further, micro-geographic attributes of the home, combined with interpersonal relations, make place attachments and ethnic identity maintenance possible in these ambivalent urban contexts.

These were not incidents specific only to Cerro Navia. As noted by another respondent, the lack of housing options available to families, as well as complex personal and socioeconomic circumstances, lead to cramped home conditions in similarly insecure conditions in the Maipu comuna:

My half-sister has two kids and she suffered domestic violence and left the father. Then they all had to come live with us because her mum threw her out … imagine, our house is 32m². It’s a neighborhood with lots of drug trafficking. On top of that, I had to start to work in a packing factory at weekends, bank holidays, during holidays to help support us, so I had no days off. (Male, 24, Maipu)

These residential difficulties are managed and negotiated within the home space to establish personal and family emotional and affective links, and also meaningful geographical and social connections. The young participants’ narratives did not refer to home conditions as “overcrowded.” Rather, they facilitated the recreation of Mapuche social organization of the extended family or lineage clan (lof) composed of various families, relatives, and close friends who share a single territory or community. Hence, despite living in tight conditions, the young people referred to its vital role in creating place attachment and place identity.

Space is never static, but rather is always under construction and predicated upon plurality (Massey 2005). Hence, whilst the comuna presents individual risks, the home is reconfigured and adapted to make it meaningful and symbolically resemble the Mapuche cultural practices. Therefore, the home becomes the first and essential place where place identity and attachment is constructed in urban culturally alienated spaces. It is around the kitchen table where the family regularly meets to talk and share food and drink that they identify as being Mapuche and historically significant. Place attachment was often inferred through youngsters’ narratives by Mapuche-associated food sharing, talking, and preparing and drinking mate.⁴ Drinking mate is associated with practices such as passing on ancestral myths and family stories, advising young people, and telling and interpreting dreams. Young people prepare mate to share among family members, at times among younger siblings when time permits in the over fall living style of Santiago. As one respondent described:

Sometimes with my sister, (…) I say, “I fancy having a mate, do you?” We buy a muffin and we get together for that, just for enjoying our mate (…) We sit down, we drink mate and chat. (Female, 28, focus group, Cerro Navia)

Another key practice through which Mapuche cultural practices are known, given affective valence, and serve as emotionally sustaining is the transmission of stories and narratives about older family members’ lives. Narratives include reference to, and are associated with, specific social geographies and ancestral times consistently linked into the family history. During the interviews, these narratives were often staged in the heart of family houses, the kitchen.

Yes, the same memories that my father has [I have] as well. He tells us his stories of when he used to attend the Ngillatun or participated in family gatherings [where he played football] when he lived in the south. We know loads of these stories. (Female, 28, Cerro Navia)

And it’s her [my grandmother] who has to teach us, sitting with her and talking and hearing about her dreams that she regularly has. For me, that’s … it’s the basis, I think. My grandmother is here, she’s someone … a fundamental backbone because she is the person who was born and raised there [in the south]. So she knows more, and so has had the experience. (Female, 23, La Pintana)

Despite being raised in Santiago in a comuna with which they may hold little identification, extended family relations in the household create an environment for ethnic identity construction in which a collective tuwün (place of origin) is narrated, imagined, and recreated. That is, the home becomes an extension of the ancestral territories in the Chilean south, re-creating traditional practices that are linked to particular landscapes. These everyday situated practices of ethnic identity construct dynamic forms of emplacement and sense of belonging, despite their corporal absence from these places (Di Giminiani 2016; Webb 2014).

Mapuche young people – themselves raised and often born in Santiago – contextualize specific practices (such as the use of herbal remedies) in relation to Mapuche-identified landscape features and interventions. While parenting, young adults reproduce treatments for minor illnesses, practices learnt from older family members and which the younger generation associate explicitly and unproblematically with Mapuche culture (eg. chamomile, boldo [Peumus boldus, or folo in mapuzungun], mint).

Interviewer: Which activities and cultural practices do you do with the family to feel and identify as Mapuche?

Respondant: (…) well, mainly the food and medicinal herbs (…) and the medicines that I give my children when they get ill. Manzanilla, menta, boldo and herbs like that (…) and hot water with toasted sugar for stomach aches. (Female, 28, Peñalolen)

This quote suggests that using Mapuche-associated herbs and plants, which in many Santiago households are planted in tiny spaces, recreates a quotidian and regular practice that has not lost its connection with Mapuche self-identification. Medicinal plants raised at home become the anchor for place attachment to urban enclaves that allows place identification and ethnic identity maintenance. In fact, these situated practices actively recreate the Mapuche medicine and construct a cultural landscape within the city; they detach the home from its physical location in the capital and symbolically transfer it to more meaningful spaces.

In the same fashion, around some houses with larger plots, migrant households have built a ruka,⁵ where families organize diverse events for the comuna residents and other members of the public. Hence, although rukas are built on household property, they are deliberately constructed to offer larger spaces for activities associated strongly with Mapuche. Rukas serve semi-public functions including cooking around the kütral (central fire) and family meetings around mate since the arrival of the first Mapuche immigrant families. Yet, ruka construction and organized activities have a more recent history in Santiago (Thiers 2012). In such sites, family members develop activities such as roasting wheat in a kayana⁶ or talking about Mapuche culture to school children from comuna schools through the year. In some cases, these semi-private spaces are constructed and run by Mapuche civil associations. Association members organize and pay for the majority of costs of cultural and religious ceremonies including Nguillatun (Mapuche major thanksgiving ceremony involving large numbers of families) and We Tripantu.⁷ These events are publicized with leaflets distributed in the neighborhood and local articles, to ensure participation of Mapuche associations and households, and winkas (non-Mapuche people).

According to respondents, because these semi-private spaces are larger than the domestic ones, they permit distinctive ethnocultural practices on a larger scale and with a wider impact. In semi-public places (open to the public on select occasions), the resident Mapuche family who owns and organizes the ruka and its surroundings value how it allows them, as Mapuche cultural representatives, to scale up and diversify the audiences for Mapuche practices. Speaking about a ruka next to the family house, one young woman explained, “Here the ruka – it’s for promoting culture (…) we do things as a family; and that’s how we always maintain [Mapuche] culture” (Female, 23, La Pintana). Crucially, despite the ambivalence surrounding the risks and dangers posed by the surrounding comuna, the Mapuche youth involved in the research emphasize the connections and networks that their families create in these semi-public spaces. It is through these larger cultural spaces where the young strengthen their ethnic identity and develop their sense of community.

Rather than self-segregating, the families are involved in re-constructing and transforming these spaces so as to foment collective identities and culturally meaningful interpersonal relationships. Similar urban activism – particularly in ecological practices – has been argued to re-define the neighborhood politics of space (Dixon and Durrheim 2004; Dixon, Durrheim, and Di Masso 2014; Purcell 2001).

To summarize, practices create spaces in the city not merely by re-creating something identical or equal to practices implemented in the south, but by creating a new space, in part through the meanings and emotional weight acquired through family connections and household practices (Chow and Healey 2008). Mapuche urban households and families produce spaces in a domestic sphere that, due to quotidian reproduction and articulation of components, give rise to a strongly ethno-cultural set of referents and place identity (Becerra et al. 2017). Despite deeply entrenched inequalities in Chilean society, requiring Mapuche families to reside in insecure and poorly-connected neighborhoods, household spaces are re-designed to promote place-attachment and place identity. Home territories, in this regard, are created inside the household, or in limited cases on larger plots of private land. Whilst loss of autonomy and ownership of ancestral territories remains a fundamental injustice that Mapuche organizations contest up to the present, the situational-salience of ethnic identity has been transferred to and reconfigured in the urban home. Everyday engagement with practices in domestic spaces associated with Mapuche culture, imagined and associated with a larger territory in the south of the country, is imbued with a strong sense of cultural and place identity.

Public spaces

As alluded to above, first- or second-generation migrants in Santiago not only participate in home-based practices but also become involved in the organization of community-scale practices and inter-communal activities. These practices re-scale territorial attachment by enacting traditions from the ancestral territories in the south whilst simultaneously challenging the limits and structural forces of the neighborhood, producing culturally meaning places from below to the more public sphere. In this way, public urban spaces are used to challenge the normative boundaries of the comuna, creating “multiple and intersecting neighborhood boundaries in a given physical space” (Campbell et al. 2009, 463). Whilst the home is a scaled-down site for place attachment within a broader landscape of structural inequality, communal parks offer a similar role in the comuna’s public spaces.

Despite widespread exclusion in the political, economic, and social sphere, urban Mapuche organizations have been successful in negotiating with the local government to introduce limited instances of ethnic reaffirmation (Espinoza 2017). Some municipal governments (especially those with an Indigenous Affairs Office), for example, have authorized the creation of ceremonial parks and the use of soccer fields for palin games in response to demands from Mapuche organizations.

Here the organization [Kiñe Pu Liwen] does various activities, and the great majority I don’t participate in by now. One grows up and gets responsibilities. Now [it’s] the university, and before that I used to work so I didn’t have time to. I used to participate a lot. For example, we had a musical group – we danced, we did plays. But as we grew up – [as with] all this generation (…) the group broke up. Because we got new responsibilities, every one of us, and that’s how it was abandoned. (Female, 22, La Pintana)

Here, the older people have more time to dedicate themselves to the culture. We young people have to work and study a lot and so we don’t have much time left over. (Female, 27, Cerro Navia).

Whilst these spaces in Cerro Navia and La Pintana comunas symbolically represent (what ought to be) key advancements in multicultural recognition, many of the young people involved in the research were more ambivalent over their active participation in the cultural activities due to time scarcity and/or the benefits they had been able to derive from them.

Notwithstanding personal reasons that may prevent some from participating, others – especially in the Peñalolen comuna – were more skeptical about the political implications of local governments supporting these initiatives. One young woman described some of these public events as “folkloric forms” of cultural performance, rather than “proper” ritual. Additionally, the unevenness of political recognition by each local authority led her to criticize Mapuche organizations as being accomplice in this process.

Sure [we have places for Mapuche culture], but in relation to the dances and things like that no. I know about them but they aren’t done [properly, as the rite requires]. It’s more like for presentations I find. In an organization in which we participated, they used to do these things but here [in Peñalolen] it’s not so, it’s only in ethnic food festivals (…). I don’t know (…) any strong organization that fights for these things. I think that it starts there, people have little interest. Because if there were more interest, I think these things would be done, like many other things are done. If one joins a group and goes to the municipality to ask for things, the municipality gives it. I think that if they were organized, there would be these things. But there isn’t interest among people, I think, to do these things. This regards to the Mapuche, at least in this comuna, – because I go to other comunas and see things. But here there’s nothing. (Female, 28, Peñalolen)

The rescaling of Mapuche cultural practice as a comparatively more systematized and public set of knowledges, exemplified here, is a distinction between a willingness to support indigenous cultural expression as folklore in neoliberal multiculturalism, and a form of indigeneity and positionality vis-a-vis the postcolonial state that questions the sufficiency of cultural recognition (Hale 2004). We found some young Mapuche discursively position their comuna’s cultural organizations and municipal authorities as agents responsible for granting visibility to ethno-cultural practices. This is the case of the young person in the above extract, who self-positions as Mapuche yet does not articulate her subjectivity in relation to active involvement in the recreation of cultural practices; her account emphasizes a more passive, unmoored subjectivity.

Nevertheless, such perspectives were not ubiquitous. Some participants were more optimistic about inclusiveness in Chilean society, stating that it has advanced beyond the explicit racism and exclusion of the past. As one young man from Padre Hurtado comuna narrated, opportunities to express ethnic identity in public spaces is no longer as stigmatized or as segregated as it once was:

I’m convinced Chile has evolved, the Chilean mindset has evolved even more, so people respect Indigenous Peoples now. When I finished school and stated to move around Santiago (…). I saw society promoting indigenous affairs and greater respect for them; it’s been a massive change. My mum, for example, never wore traditional clothes before, but now she goes to the center of the city with it on (…). Of course, there is a bit of everything but nowadays its [discrimination] much less common. (Male, 28, Padre Hurtado)

It is interesting to note that, in mentioning his mother wearing her indigenous costumes in Santiago downtown, this young man exemplified how the practice of Mapuche cultural activities in public spaces in Santiago has evolved towards a more inclusive public attitude.

For others, the city needed to be actively re-thought, not only as a political site of struggle for making indigenous demands visible, but also in connecting with the non-human agents that are overlooked and suffocated within urban contexts (Di Giminiani 2016). According to one participant, this act of recovering specific spaces to generate renewed versions of the Mapuche trawün, was intertwined with ancestral spiritual connections to nature. This allows the young to connect and identify with a park in the Renca comuna where the Mapuche meet and develop their cultural rites. The youth’s ethnic identitification is revealed below by the use of the pronoun “our” in the phrase “our trawün.”

Our trawun is being renewed by regenerating the communities here, by seeking out spaces. In Renca, I know of a movement that is emerging. They celebrate We Tripantu in the Las Palmeras Park, and up by the cave because there is water running there that supposedly comes from Treng Treng,⁸ from what the brothers [peñis] told me is a source of energy that comes from the hill itself, so that’s why they hold ceremonies there. They are recovering these spaces, just like White hill [cerro Blanco], they are doing the same in Renca. (Male, 26, Renca)

In other interviews, the Mapuche parks were spoken of as a site for normalizing Mapuche activities, marking a presence, as well as information exchanges about political demands. In particular, these spaces were seen to set out new boundaries of belonging since they are instances of inter-communal and even inter-regional relationships that connect specific comunas to a broader territory. The following example is cited in reference to Cerro Navia Ceremonial Park:⁹

We use all the spaces we can, that are possible because now we don’t hide ourselves away from anyone. So the Park is a reference point in whichever place we can carry out an activity and no-one says anything (…). But Cerro Navia comuna is free for people who want to make use of it, the comuna; there’s no lack [of resources]. Yes, there’s a [Mapuche] procedure for the palin game,¹⁰ with a great welcome, friendly. The young men [peñis] come, the ones who’ve been involved in the [territorial] conflict. They come to meet up with people here, to ask for help, to let us know what’s going on with the repression and the land. There’s this connection (…) The Park is the center, the center of the universe of Cerro Navia. Anything to do with Mapuche cosmovision [it’s the] Mapuche Ceremonial Park in Cerro Navia, which is the name they gave it – the institutions, the municipalities (…) it’s called Weichafe Mapu.¹¹ Yes, it is our Weichafe Mapu. (Male, 45, Cerro Navia)

The narrative of this young adult reveals how place attachment and place identity are built upon a public park in which the Mapuche culture has settled renewed urban cultural practices. The Weichafe mapu [land of warriors] represents a re-writing of postcolonial history around an account that situates Chile as a part of Mapuche territory, and renames that land as characterized by indigenous agency. By drawing parallels between Weichafe Mapu and the Ceremonial Park in Cerro Navia suggests that the comuna, if not the city itself, can be re-conquered and re-signified as a site of indigenous territorial reclaiming. It is evident that the ethnification of this space is emphasized as a collective and universal belonging, “free for people,” and re-locates its position within the city from its peripheral geography to a spiritual and political nucleus (Imilan 2009). Similarly, the activities performed there are attributed with broader significance than “folkloric” reproduction; they are an arena to disseminate up-to-the minute information about how Mapuche territory is embroiled in contested processes of territorialization and control.

Some of the narratives expressed by the young people equated public spaces as key sites for families to re-establish a relationship with the earth/mapu. One young woman expressed this as an opportunity to be with nature, rather than merely using it, while ensuring young children’s interaction with this culture could be defined and practiced on Mapuche terms:

As I was saying before, you see here within here (…) a few blocks away we have the Parque Ceremonial Mapuche where we can go in and out, and take the kids to play (…). What I like about this place is that there are places in nature, for enjoying our spare time and so be with the earth, sitting on the grass, playing. As they don’t have anything like it in other comunas, it has to be looked after. (Female, 27,Cerro Navia)

Finally, we also found more creative and imaginative forms of recreating tuwün and sense of belonging in spaces that have not been intentionally re-claimed for indigenous practices. For one participant, in the same comuna previously criticized (see above) for a lack of political intervention, the natural landscape of the mountain range is enough to reproduce connections with the South.

For example, the Mahuida Park is [near] the Macul¹² Valley, and yes it makes me feel like I’m in the south. It’s a different space. But it makes you feel that you’re in the south especially because the air is clean, the nature (…). The trees aren’t the same but you see the Cordillera [Andes mountains] and you’re at peace. You don’t see for example cars, vehicles. Then you feel that you’re in a quiet place and it makes you feel that you’re in the south. (Male, 36, Peñalolén)

A common theme across the young people’s narratives is to recognize the city as topographically open to re-signification, in which a sense of belonging can be created through interaction with specific spaces. This young’s relation of the memories, feelings, emotions, and sensations that the Cordillera causes on him at its very sight reveals how sense of place and place attachment is constructed among the urban youth. It is important to understand these public spaces in the context of their residence, since the lack of identification with their immediate neighborhood – as a place that signifies risk and marginality – is offset by belonging to these politically contested parks which mark a re-vindication for their ethnic visibility (Carmona Yost 2014). For a number of interviewees, these areas are not only recreational and culturally educational spaces, but also create connections to the mapu in highly urbanized surroundings. Place attachment is not universally experienced across the city, but rather is situationally determined by the degree of success experienced in collaborations with local governments. As some of the more ambivalent narratives cited in this section suggest, not all comunas are equally open to transforming these landscapes, and not all young people are in a position to enjoy these spaces. Whereas in Cerro Navia municipal authorities responded to group demands, comunas such as Peñalolén have public spaces that present multicultural folklore. Nonetheless, where these demands have been met, links to both one’s origins, as well as non-human agents create important place attachment.

Public spaces open to the practice of the culture signifies key sites for Mapuche families to develop place attachment and ethnic identity by re-establishing a relationship with the earth/mapu.

Educational spaces

In this final section, we discuss the young people’s encounters with institutional space, and one which historically has been a socializing force for assimilation and the exclusion of ethnic identity (Webb and Radcliffe 2015). Most of the young people involved in the research project had encountered numerous institutional barriers during their educational trajectories. Some cited the segregated and isolated nature of their schooling, others low-quality teaching, whilst others ethnic discrimination from peers or staff. In Chile, as elsewhere, these cumulative disadvantages generally lead to lower numbers of indigenous students enrolling at university, or clustering into less prestigious institutions and subject-areas (Oliva and Zapata 2011; Villarroel et al. 2014). Despite these pressures and difficulties, the young people interviewed had successfully navigated these inequalities and reached tertiary education.

In each case, the respondents reflected on the opportunities that higher education offers as an avenue for young Mapuche to reaffirm cultural knowledge in Santiago. Despite secondary education omitting ethnic identity from its establishments, some of the young people attested that university space was one which could be used to reverse this tendency, and furthermore to strengthen ethnic identification within urban context.

So, this is what I did a couple of years ago (…) at the Catholic University in Santiago, I took a course where the lecturer gave mapuzungun lessons. And I wanted to be there to learn something, as I like the culture. Now if there were the possibility to be more involved in this I would do it, because I like it. It’s like (…) it’s my identity and I’m always trying to regain [it] or at least know something else about our culture. And I’m always involved with this because I like it. (Male,36, Peñalolen)

I always saw the Mapuche as belonging to the past, because that’s what schools teach. But in my third year [of university] they gave us different options for our seminary presentation. There was one on the Mapuche and I said, “well I´m Mapuche and I’ve never explored this.” What’s more I didn’t fancy any of the other options. That’s when I started getting involved, and it’s gone on in stages. Then I started to feel obliged to study Mapuzungun. That experience has helped me see the Mapuche world as something diverse rather than static. (Female, 25, Conchalí)

Although university may be regarded as a universal space to advance in knowledge on the most various sciences, for an indigenous youth it may also serve as a space for personal self-knowledge, cultural introspection, and the will to inquire into one’s ethnic identity and sense of belonging, as it occurred with the young above.

Interacting with university spaces can be empowering for indigenous youth to the extent that they provide new knowledges, support networks, and ways of seeing the world so as to enhance ethnic identity and disrupt the established norms therein. Hybrid identities can be developed to co-opt colonial knowledge, to put it toward emancipatory community goals rather than individualistic human capital development (Pidgeon 2008). As the example below demonstrates, the agency of one young female was able not only to radically alter the institution’s rules for her course of studies, but also to develop a sense of attachment with her educational place for being open to the cultural expressions of indigenous peoples that inhabit Chile.

For the final coursework we had to hand in a report on gaps in the [Chilean] Constitution. My course-mates suggested the Mapuche conflict, and that’s what we did. But I said to my professor, ‘for me formal dress is not what you call formal dress, and I want to come to the exam in my traditional clothes.’ He was fascinated by the idea and agreed, then I said, ‘and another thing, if I’m going to speak about this issue, I want to do it in my native language.’ He looked at me for a long time and then said, ‘excellent, do it.’ (Female, 20, Peñalolen)

These initiatives were not merely individual efforts, but also led in some cases to networks that sought to transform the whiteness and to make the racism of organized space present on university campuses visible (Barajas and Ronnkvist 2007), and to furthermore turn these into more friendly and culturally sensitive spaces, as the young woman reports below.

We started an organization with the idea of (…) a space where we could spread indigenous peoples ideas and thinking in the university. We realized nobody knew anything about indigenous peoples, and that it was necessary to change that (…) we gave talks, I started to speak in public, I became something like a leader, even though I don’t have much of a personality for that (…) and through this [organization] I’ve met a lot of people and made contacts. (Female, 23, Cerro Navia)

The absence of intercultural education at secondary or tertiary levels in Chile has been a point of contention, particularly for ethno-nationalist indigenous organizations whose political demands include the creation of an indigenous university. Yet, despite the lack of political will to transform educational landscapes from above, such as happened in the public spaces of communal Mapuche parks, it is evident that specific knowledge agents are facilitating transformation from below. Unlike the practices developed inside the home, this institutional space can promote ethnic identification and place attachment, even without prior knowledge or intentionality on the part of either the participants, or the education system itself. As noted by one young man, this institutional space had unwittingly created opportunities for political vindication.

I knew nothing about Mapuche culture, beyond what I saw on television and some family traditions (…) I always had a sense that I was different to others, but then I started to study Anthropology, which gave me tools to take forward a process of vindication. It taught me to value being different. I think that was its contribution, more than teaching me any kind of cultural knowledge or worldvision. (Male, 26, Padre Hurtado)

All the participants from the study who had reached university were the first-generation from their families to do so, and in this regard are pioneering new ways of negotiating these unequal spaces. Despite the absence of intercultural education initiatives in Chilean universities, the young Mapuche were confronting these whitened spaces, and were interrupting the pedagogic practices of racialized silencing – prevalent throughout the educational system (Webb, Canales, and Becerra 2017) – through their inter-personal relationships and, in some cases, challenges to the institutional norms.

Conclusions

A place-based account of ethnic identity requires attention to everyday contexts in which collective membership and place attachment become salient. That is, the activation of ethnic schemas and attachments occurs through “situationally specific cues and triggers” (Brubaker, Loveman, and Stamatov 2004, 42). Although we know a good deal about Mapuche urban youth practices and their cultural appropriation of global youth culture (Azkintuwe 2010; Imilan 2000`underlineb`/underlineb), to date there has been little attention given to where these activities become meaningful. Whereas for older generations of Mapuche migrants, the locus of their place identity continues to be in the south (Bello 2012; Turra et al. 2014), interviews with younger generations suggest that place attachment in some cases is developed in relation to specific sites in urban Santiago. Crucially, these spaces open up new opportunities for identities that do not obey class-based or ghettoized affiliations as pobladores (those living in segregated working-class residential spaces) (Imilan 2009), but instead seek to lay claims on ethnic collective belonging throughout the comuna and beyond it.

Through a situationist lens (Banks 1996), it becomes apparent that dominant narratives around indigeneity, land, and generational change – which suggest that younger generations of indigenous people are becoming less attached to group territories – are too simplistic. Countering this theorization, our study has described how migration and urbanization does not necessarily entail the dispersal and slow de-emphasizing of collective attachments to original territories in relation to Mapuche youth in Santiago. Rather, ethnicity is a flexible and malleable phenomenon that operates between different scales (local, regional, national, global) and is situationally variable and negotiable (Jenkins 1997). To say that ethnicity is context-dependent is not to remove agency from social actors; as we have detailed throughout the article, Mapuche youth actively construct meaningful practices in and through particular spaces.

For some Mapuche youth living in Santiago, none of the cultural processes described in this article are relevant to their identities, whilst for others different place attachments are no doubt formed. The purpose of this article is not to delimit the boundaries at which Mapuche urban youth identity is constructed, but to demonstrate that situational criteria are keys to understanding the salience of ethnicity. That is, the discussion based around indigenous identification in Chile cannot be reduced to a dichotomy of assimilation/re-ethnification or rural/urban, but rather where and when ethnic identity becomes salient or important, and how particular spaces attribute meaning to collective membership.

As seen throughout this article, whether in domestic, public, or institutional spaces, younger generations of urban Mapuche navigate quotidian structures with aptitude so as to foment identity-enhancing practices. Whilst more politicized ethnic identity construction has been documented in more official spaces (Terwindt 2009), we have demonstrated how everyday spaces such as the home, public areas, and institutional involvement can inform these identities, and be transformed by them. In the latter sites, there is a palpable tension between state-led action and personal agency, to the extent that symbolic re-signification of these spaces is greatly facilitated by top-down interventions (the creations of communal parks and curricular inclusion of indigenous peoples) but is by no means delimited by it. Instead, place attachment is evidently located at, and within, flexible boundaries; personal spaces can be opened up to the public for educational purposes, natural spaces are re-imagined as connections to ancestral territories, comuna initiatives are transformed into a Mapuche universe representing the entire city, and human capital training centers are converted into community-enhancing opportunities.

Further research is required along similar analytical lines to expand this exploratory project. It is critical that ethnic studies move beyond the reification of “groupism” as something internally homogenous, permanent, and ubiquitous (Brubaker 2002). We have focused on locally-based and individually constructed criteria of belonging to the category of “Mapuche” among urban youth as a step toward this, but there is little doubt that more places, and a wider array of meanings attributed to them, are part of the everyday ethnic constructions forged by other social actors in Santiago.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This article reports findings of FONDECYT grant N°1140500 (2014-2016): “Narrating Place Identities. Sociocultural places recreated by indigenous Mapuche families in Santiago, Chile.”

Notes on contributors

María-Eugenia Merino

María-Eugenia Merino is Senior Professor of Linguistics and Discourse Analysis at the Universidad Autónoma de Chile, where she directs the English Teacher Training program at the Faculty of Education. She has received national research grants to study prejudice and discrimination in Chilean oral discourse, psychological effects of perceived discrimination among the Mapuche, discursive ethnic identity constructions of urban Mapuche adolescents, and ethnic identity narratives, cultural places, and ritual practices of migrant Mapuche in Santiago.

Andrew Webb

Andrew Webb is Associate Professor at the Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on schooling and inequalities in contexts of ethnic diversity. He has researched issues relating to school climate, school segregation, institutional racism, teacher expectations, interculturality/multiculturalism and youth identities using qualitative methodologies in primary, secondary, and tertiary education settings.

Sarah Radcliffe

Sarah Radcliffe is a professor of Latin American Geography, University of Cambridge, UK, is political and cultural geographer whose work on postcolonial exclusion, development, and citizenship is informed by decolonial Indigenous and feminist theory. Her current research engages with the politics of intersectional difference and postneoliberal governance. Recent research on Mapuche youth positionalities on education, citizenship, and indigenous rights are published in Antropologías del Sur (2017), Children’s Geographies (2016), Space and Polity (2015) and Race, Ethnicity and Education (2015).

Sandra Becerra

Sandra Becerra is a psychologist with a PhD in Educational Research, specializing in human interaction. She is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education of the Catholic University of Temuco, Chile. Her research interests include prejudice and discrimination against ethnic minorities, and discrimination and relational violence at school. She has conducted research on prejudice and discrimination against Mapuche students, and how violence and abuse are deployed in educational contexts.

Carmen Gloria Aillañir

Carmen Gloria Aillañir, a Mapuche and native speaker of mapudungun, holds a Bachelor in Primary Education with specialization in intercultural bilingual education. She has extensive experience as a researcher on discrimination against Mapuche people, and on Mapuche kimün (knowledge). Additionally, she has acted as intercultural bilingual facilitator at various indigenous organizations in the Araucania region, Chile.

Notes

1. The majority of sample families earn a living in technical or manual low paid jobs, or small-scale commerce (e.g. Mapuche food, wood carved utensils). Mapuche populations in Santiago and the south include many adherents to evangelical churches, which dissuade adherents from practicing ethnocultural practices. In the sample, one older woman withdrew from the focus group citing her evangelical faith, while two young people combined Mapuche self-identification and practice with evangelical norms.

2. One interviewee was in his forties, his social status as a youth confirmed by being unmarried, living at home with his parents.

3. The campamentos (camps) provide evidence of extreme poverty and marginalization in Chile’s cities as residents had to improvise precarious huts in abandoned sites or landfills.

4. Mate is drunk from a single vessel among family members, historically while sitting around a ruka fire pit, and now at the dining room or kitchen table. It is a caffeinated, tea-like beverage sipped with a metal straw, originally from Argentina and now widespread among Chilean Mapuche.

5. A straw, mud, and pole building of variable size, strongly associated with rural, southern Mapuche culture and settlement.

6. A large flat metal spoon over the fire.

7. Mapuche New Year, celebrated on June 24th.

8. Reference to the Mapuche foundational myth and the positive and creative energies given away to the mapu/land.

9. The Ceremonial Park “Newen Mali Witxan Mapu” in Cerro Navia was installed by the town council after years of demands from various Mapuche organizations to provide a permanent space. Three hectares in size, the park today comprises 8,000 m² of green areas, a large ruka built according to ancestral requirements, a rewe installation and a 1,600 m² palin field, with a variety of native flora. The park also includes a multipurpose large room for community meetings and training courses.

10. These protocols comprise greetings, an exchange of lineage information, and enquiries about family members’ health and occur in other encounters such as pentukun.

11. “Weichafe” originates from weichan, which means make war and/or fight in defense of an enemy’s attack to one’s territory. Weichafe is the warrior who defends the territory under attack. The right phrase for “Weichafe Mapu” would be “wichan pey ñi Mapu” which means defending one’s territorial space. In the Cerro Navia comuna there is the Navia hill, a unique space to which Mapuche neighbours attach cultural meaning because they feel “culturally protected” due to its newen (good spirit and strength), which protects its people and supports them to fight and defend (weichañpen) against all types of discrimination and prejudice.

12. During the weekends, families go to Quebrada de Macul, a green area in Peñalolén for picnics or camping, to enjoy clean air and the environment. In comparison to the South, Quebrada de Macul is arid and hot, but has diverse flora including quillay, maiten, bollen, guayacán, litre and peumo trees, and fauna (perdiz chilena, chiricocas, and tencas).