The Ethics of Occupation: Appropriation and Alignment as Spatial PracticeS Among Mapuche ...

225 Pages·2015·7.7 MB·English

The Ethics of Occupation: Appropriation and Alignment as Spatial PracticeS
Among Mapuche Activists and Student Protesters in Santiago, Chile

A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Kelly E McKay

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Margaret Werry, Cindy Garcia

September 2015
© Kelly McKay 2015
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Acknowledgements

An enormous thank you:

To Jennifer Silva, Margaret Werry, Cindy Garcia, Jill Lane, Bianet Castellanos, Kate
McConnell, Pat McNamara, Anjélica Afanador-Pujol, Michal Kobialka, Franco Lavoz,
Felipe Rivas, Rolando Salazar, Manuel Alvarado, Matías Aranguiz, Ivone Barriga,
Leticia Robles Moreno, Emmanuelle Lambert-Lemoine, Fraani I., Kemy A., Mauricio L.,
RDP, and everyone else who supported this project and told me to keep going.

To the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance, the College of Liberal Arts, GAPSA, and
the Global Programs and Strategy Alliance for making my research possible.

To everyone who was kind to me in Santiago, spoke extra slowly, and patiently answered
my endless questions. Mil gracias pa la buena onda.

To Kelly, for the perfectly-timed bloody marys and rational opinions; to Sarah, for
always bringing the second bottle of wine; to Kristen, for reminding me that we are
artists; to Michelle, for brain beads, summer shandy, and inarguable logic; to Muff and
Harmony, who were both kind enough to never make me talk about this project; to Slay,
for making my first year in MN bearable; to Tamara, for bravery and cuntiness; to Carra,
for writing dates, long-distance support, and talking through my tears; and to my sweet
Charley, for getting me out of bed every morning and keeping my priorities in line.

To my family, who lovingly and patiently supported me from afar, even when they didn’t
really know what I was doing.

To Bev and Dave, whose kindness has meant the world to me.

And most of all, to Greg, who reappeared at just the right time. I love you. It’s no
exaggeration to say that I couldn’t have done it without you.
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Dedication

For Truscott Kelly, who always believed I’d be “Dr. Kel” one day.
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Table of Contents
Introduction…….. iv
Chapter 1: Foundations of Occupation: A historical look at theatre and politics in
Mapuche activism during the 20th century …….. 1
Chapter 2: Las generaciones sin miedo: Three Case Studies in a History of Chilean
Activism…….. 50
Chapter 3: Mari Mari, Santiago Newen!: Spatial Practices in Mapuche Activism
Today …….. 76
Chapter 4: Occupying Places, Occupying History: Spatial Practices in Student Activism
Today…….. 116
Epilogue…… 161
Bibliography……. 163
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Introduction
An Introduction to the Introduction
As a visitor to the city of Santiago during the “Chilean Winter” of 2011, I
unintentionally became a witness to the beginnings of the student rebellion that has
continued through early 2015. Originally in Santiago to research the role of hip hop in the
Mapuche rights movement (the Mapuche being the most populous indigenous group in
Chile), I made a point of attending hip hop shows of all kinds: mainstream, underground,
popular, indie, anything I could find. This approach led me to a variety of hip hop
concerts and festivals in support of the student movement, some of which brought me
inside schools under occupation by student protestors. As an outsider at these events, and
an outsider with a particular research interest, I immediately began noticing references to
the Mapuche. I took note of the almost ubiquitous appearance of the Mapuche kultrun
symbol1 on t-shirts, banners, and flags of protestors. I heard frequent references to
“solidarity with our Mapuche brothers and sisters” by speakers and performers and read
similar messages on banners and in graffiti. I listened to retellings of “old Mapuche
folktales,” like “Lágrimas de oro y plata,” offered as examples of the kind of values
espoused by students in opposition to the government.2 I viewed photography exhibitions

1 The kultrun symbol shows the four cardinal points in a Mapuche worldview and
represents both wisdom and the earth. The kultrun appears in the center of the Mapuche
national flag, as well as on the drums used by machi (shamans) during religious and
healing ceremonies.
2 Lágrimas de oro y plata, tears of gold and silver, is a popular story about ancient
Araucanians asking whether gold or silver came first. Nano Stern wrote a pop song about
it. The moral, more or less, is that gold and silver are evil.
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that displayed pictures of student protestors in violent confrontations with police next to
pictures of Mapuche protestors in violent confrontations with police.
While witnessing these varied references to or connections with Mapuche, I
became curious as to the reasoning behind students' apparent push for solidarity and
interest in depicting themselves as aligned with Mapuche activists. Although I can see
how the two movements might intersect in some ways, the references I witnessed did not
make these intersections explicit. The students' move to align with Mapuche seemed to
me particularly curious given that while the student movement enjoys fairly widespread
popular support for their cause, the Mapuche movement in Chile is widely represented
and denounced as a destructive bunch of trouble-making terrorists—not to mention the
fact that Mapuche face everyday discrimination. Also, given the absence of self-
identified Mapuche in visible roles at any of the events I witnessed or in the leadership of
the student movement, I wondered to what extent actors within the Mapuche rights
movement participated in or might benefit from these expressions of solidarity. What, I
began asking, are the stakes of the student movement's alignment with the Mapuche
rights movement? Are the stakes different for student protestors than for Mapuche? In
order to press into these questions, I began to examine each of the two movements more
closely with the goal of determining where, in goals and/ or practices, they diverged and/
or united.

The Project
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My project is a choreographic and historiographic analysis of practices by which
contemporary activists in Santiago, Chile create new embodied frameworks for the
production of space. I study the relationship between the ongoing Chilean student
rebellion and the Mapuche rights movement by examining divergences between the
respective spatial practices of protest undertaken by student protestors and Mapuche
activists. By spatial practices, I mean the embodied activities through which people
produce and alter space. While student protestors frequently make performative and
discursive connections to Mapuche, I question whether these connections constitute
political alignments or appropriations of indigeneity. In order to investigate whether
student protest practices align with Mapuche activist political projects, I analyze the ways
that both student protestors and Mapuche activists enact radical reconfigurations of space
in the city of Santiago through their embodied practices. I identify various performative
mechanisms by which student protestors and Mapuche activists produce and change
space, including (but not limited to) choreographic restructurings, sonic interventions,
and embodied reimaginings.
Student protestors demand free public education of high quality for all Chileans,
in contrast to the current system. A voucher method instated as part of the military
dictatorship's neoliberal reforms structures access to education unequally based on family
income. The privatization of much of the school system has turned education into a
commodity and led to rising costs and diminishing quality. Protestors call for
constitutional reform regulating the national government's oversight of education as a
free, not-for-profit system with expanded subsidies. Like student protestors, Mapuche
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activists also come into conflict with the neoliberal policies of the state, finding that
government priorities value development projects that destroy Mapuche lands and
lifeways over Mapuche welfare. Mapuche activists struggle for the restoration of seized
territory, an end to the destruction of Mapuche farmlands, and recognition as a sovereign
people.
Students have sought to articulate their demands through extended occupations of
school campuses and large-scale interventions in public spaces. While Mapuche activists
rely on similar tactics, spatial occupation holds a unique significance for a group whose
primary demands include the restoration of ancestral lands and recognition of indigenous
sovereignty. Despite the surface-level similarity of student and Mapuche protest tactics, I
identify key differences in spatial practices they enact.
My ethnographic work focuses on case studies in order to show the distinct
embodied frameworks for the production of space posed by students, often in contrast to
those posed by Mapuche. My historiographic work historicizes the spatial practices I
identify through an analysis of protest focused on spatiality. While most scholarly
treatments of student and indigenous social movements conceive of protest as
deliberative political enunciations addressed to a state apparatus, my project proposes an
understanding of protest as spatial practice. This focus on space allows for a careful
analysis of the differences between the everyday embodied practices of activists in the
respective movements.

Basic Background
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Since May 2011, Chilean university and high school students have been
protesting institutionalized inequalities in the educational system, a system that displays
the effects of the Pinochet regime's extreme neoliberal economic policies. Demanding
free public education with access unrestricted by family economic status, students have
held marches, occupied school buildings, and engaged in a variety of theatrical protest
tactics ranging from kiss-ins in a public plaza to dancing flash mobs in front of the
presidential palace. Scholarship and media to date has focused almost entirely on the
students' more theatrical methods, as well as moments of violent confrontation between
students and police. My dissertation aims to move beyond the moments of spectacularity
to a serious analysis of the quotidian practices and histories that inform and shape the
movement.
Chilean students have been a political force since the formation of the first
federation of university students at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1930s,
students in Santiago led protests against dictatorial President Carlos Ibáñez and in the
1950s, they led protests against Chile's increasingly high cost of living. Though the
Pinochet dictatorship effectively wiped out almost all forms of popular organization in
Chile, student federations survived. The largest prior student movement was the Penguin
Revolution of 2006, a brief period of protests critiquing the continuation of neoliberal
educational policies put in place by the Pinochet government. While students pointed to
Pinochet's privatization and commoditization of education as underlying structural causes
of their major problems with education (e.g. unequal access and widely varying quality),
the movement ended when then-president Bachelet agreed to address some of the