4. Imaginings
In Valparaíso I had the chance one afternoon to accompany a friend to his
interview with a leader of an urban Mapuche group. Up and up the bus
climbed, often backing down to let descending buses pass. Our destination
was a wood building, 10 feet below the edge of the road down wooden steps;
the bathroom another 30 feet below the house.
The interviewee -- we'll call him Raul -- had round, dark, features, calm
but expressive. He spoke with a rhythmic cadence distinct from the
high-pitched, hell-for-leather Spanish of most Chileans (though bilingual, I
often had to tell people to slow down). His house was basically two rooms:
one long open area with a kitchen and one room in the back for the family of
five. Books and paraphernalia from many indigenous struggles in Chile lined
sparse shelves. Clearly he was a working class Chilean; clearly too he was
different. Over the next hour he would relate his struggle for respect from
institutions of society and state, a for recognition and self respect by
Mapuches of Mapuches, as Mapuches. He spoke to us of the "old days" when
his father would get slapped for simply being brown and in public. Violent
public humiliation is now largely a thing of the past. The sense I got from
Raul was that since the "old days" the Mapuche had been relegated to
invisibility before the census takers, the schools, employers, society in
general, traveling from ostracization to non-existence.
It is estimated that 10% of Chile's population (estimated at 14.2 million in
1995) is Mapuche, most of whom have either become cheap labor for
agricultural or forestry businesses, or migrated to the cities. It turns
our that there are over 28,000 Mapuche in urban Valparaíso. Among them,
Raul has dedicated his efforts to reasserting pride in identity, speaking
Mapuche at home, taking his children to their places of origin, and
organizing. The organization seemed to have two basic lines of attack:
opening space for recognition and celebration of their identity as Mapuche
in the urban areas, and supporting the struggles of Mapuche in the rural
areas in their confrontation with lumber companies. Apropos of recent posts
on native peoples and natural resources, there are ongoing conflicts in Chile.
Three months before our visit trucks belonging to the lumber company
Forestal Bosques Arauco were burned in Lumako. The government's reaction
was a police occupation of entire regions to protect the company and crack
down on the local, mostly Mapuche, communities. The result has been a
climate of violence and insecurity. Police and company thugs wander the
region with impunity. Houses have been ransacked, domestic animals killed,
money and tools stolen, shots fired. Twelve Mapuche were also arrested in
Lumako, charged with torching the trucks.
The background to the conflict may resonate with experiences throughout
Latin America: in 1866 the lands in question were confiscated by law, and
auctioned off to criollos in 1878. Haciendas ("fundos", as they are called
in Chile) were established, and the Mapuche were forced up into the poorer
lands on the slopes surrounding the valleys. Since then the story is one of
communal disintegration, migration, and environmental degradation of local
resources, though a combination of irrational exploitation, deforestation,
and exhaustion of soils overworked by poor people for ever declining
subsistence. According to a piece by Mauricio Buendía in Punto Final, in
the 1970s it was estimated that a Mapuche family needed 50 hectares for
reasonable subsistence, while the average holding was just 9.2 hectares.
Today, the average holding is undoubtedly smaller. In short, the enclosures
are a fact; policing the boundaries still a day-to-day reality. The article
noted at least 11 major land conflicts involving almost 10,000 hectares.
28,000+ Mapuche in Valpo, and I felt as if Raul were the first one I had
seen. You must understand: where I live, in Bolivia, since the 1952
revolution the indigenous reality of the country's population has been
officially embraced/made present in various ways. Indigenous people have
never been (pardon me for trundling out an overused, ill-defined term)
"empowered", listened to or really respected in any substantive way. Racism
abounds. But the white/mestizo minority ruling class could never ignore the
"indian problem", so great in number were they. Thus, the "other" has
always been present, though variously "narrativized" and mistreated
throughout Bolivian history.
The nineteenth century in Bolivia witnessed a genocide frustrated: to pursue
the "US solution" to the "indian problem" would have meant the extinction of
available rural and mine labor, as well as a key source of state income (a
head tax on rural peoples). Yet, while they depended on indigenous rural
population for their own exploitative livelihood, they desperately desired
to wrest from them their lands, and at another level transform the face of
the county. These views were explicit in the pronouncements of prominent
statesman Gabriel Rene Moreno in the 1860's, when he wrote:
"If in any way the indians and cholos [poorer peoples of peasant-indian
extraction, who have left the countryside] are to intervene in the
progressive evolution of Bolivian society, it will necessarily be passively
through slower or faster disintegration, like secreted products expulsed
from the organic cavities of the social body, like residues pulled from the
depths of the economy ... thereby consummating the complete purification of
the national Caucasian race."
In reference to the use and distribution of land, he was equally lucid of
intent:
"Pulling those lands out of the hands of the ignorant and backward indian,
who is without means, capacity or will to cultivate, and passing them to the
innovative, active and intelligent white race, avid of property and fortune,
full of ambition and necessities, is effectively the healthiest conversion
of Bolivia's social and economic order. Exvincular [approximately to
"disconnect" or separate the rural population from] the land, then, from the
dead hands of the indian is to return [the land] to its useful condition,
productive and beneficial for all of humanity; it is to convert it into an
instrument adequate to the purposes of Providence."
Providence was to be frustrated. The 1920's and 1930's saw various agrarian
rebellions in Bolivia, with criollo elites and overseers often retreating to
the safety of the cities, terrified of le barbarie. At the same time a
"modern" indigenism was brewing, not without parallels to the Mexican case.
"Indigenism", as I am using it here, refers to a series of conceptions and
practices that, in a decisive break from the genocidal approach, sees in
"the indian" a salubrious, roughhewn, but admirable bulwark and basis for
national development. The title of a famous book of this ilk written in
Bolivia was "Raza de Bronce" -- Race of Bronze. Visual expression of this
thinking can also be seen in the Bolivian murals of the 1950s and 60,
heavily influenced by the great Mexican painters.
With the 1952 revolution the propertyless and illiterate (largely
indigenous) were allowed to vote for the first time. Between the elections
of 1951 and 1956, the votes cast jumped from 120,000 to 960,000. One
Bolivian historian drew this image: with the National Revolution, a Trojan
Horse was brought into the center of Bolivian public/political life, and out
poured the indians.
Yet with "indigenism" (the elevation of the "other" to that of virile
ur-origin of the national character) real indigenous people -- the ones who
planted, harvested, celebrated, bore children, mined, worshipped, exchanged
and manufactured -- were seldom seen or heard of. But, one must admit, it
is a step up from genocide.
Since then the narrativizations have undergone further changes under
conservative, populist and military governments. But never was simple
neglect or invisibility an option. Indigenous people, by their numbers,
active (though unequal) participation in "national" life, and vociferous
protest, never allowed it to be.
To be in Chile in the midst of thousands of indigenous people and yet
_not_see_them_ was a shocking experience. Perhaps part of my blindness was
a result of only incipient Mapuche "identity politics". Many of those Raul
counts as urban Mapuche may not see themselves as Mapuche. He admitted that
participation in cultural programs, campaigns --in sum, the work of
"identity politics" -- is very low.
In part, too, I think I was (perhaps understandably but inexcusably)
following the guidelines of official discourse that ignores them entirely.
In fairness, I should note that post-dictatorship governments have passed
laws that acknowledge indigenous presence in Chile, enacting programs to
assimilate them into Chilean society. Scholarships were mentioned, allowing
Mapuche to study at university. These program are administered in
Valparaíso from the air conditioned 11th story of the Regional Intendency.
One might reasonably ask, as Raul did rhetorically, how much can be seen
from up there.
There is a palpable feeling among some (disproportionately powerful)
Chileans that although they are very much Latin Americans, they are of a
different (whiter) category. History and numbers would seem to be on their
side: the relative numbers of indigenous people are low, while waves of
immigrants (from England, Germany, etc.) have been powerful agents in
directing the economy and politics while spinning myths of nationness. In
the "imagining of community" in Chile, Europeans of various ilk have played
an inordinately heavy role.
This is especially so now, with the myth of economic success. Saying "myth"
shouldn't suggest that there hasn't been growth, etc. Rather, it points to
the fact that an economic experiment, imposed through violence and a reign
of terror, developed and later transferred unaltered to a democratic
government ("Pinochetismo without Pinochet" [in the presidency]), has now
been recycled by adept and powerful pr-sters as a powerful comparative
advantage: the image of a stable, self-confident winner. This image is not
only for external consumption; at the level of myth it works powerfully in
Chile as well. Tomás Moulian writes:
"In the post-authoritarian governments a careful marketing of economic
success has been cultivated. From the strategic standpoint, this has been
the dimension most elaborated on in the construction of the myth of Chile Today.
"The operations thought up [for this marketing] were various: a) a planned
agenda of trips [by presidents, MPs, etc.] who enacted, before the keen eyes
of foreign investors the solidity of "consensus" and the strength of
national unity in favor of "modernization"; b) multiple contacts between
economic ministers and business executives and high level functionaries in
Japan, the US, the European Union, the World Bank and IMF, almost always
topped off with laudatory declarations of Chile's exemplary nature; c) the
planned participation of Chile in large international trade shows ...; and,
d) a careful pr campaign, directly or indirectly induced, whose theme was
"The Chilean Model".
[...]
"This campaign ... sought and seeks an external effect, for the consumption
of foreign investors and decision makers. But it also seeks to create
internal effects ... through generating identification with the model
through the idea of 'Chile the Admired' ... 'Chile on everyone's lips',
'Chile the envied'. What better positioning for a society obsessed with
grandeur, for a country with an unconfessed [never confronted] nationalism,
competitive and success-ist?"
Little wonder that in such a world, Raul and his people can, in effect, be
rendered invisible and pass unnoticed. After talking to Raul, I was shaken
by the realization of how little we really see as we move in the world, how
arduous the work of revealing the layers of human history that are "written"
onto the texture of a place! As everywhere else, in Chile sustaining
History (the official version) requires getting history systematically
wrong, an enterprise helped along mightily by the difficulty of reading
history, and the resources the purveyors of History have at their disposal.
Chile -- called puma, jaguar, leader, developed -- was/is built over the
blood of indians too! I knew this of course, had read it somewhere. Raul
embodied it, helped me to see what in Bolivia assaults one from all sides,
all day, every day. From then on in the trip, before the stifling,
overpowering myths of success, order, civility and general whiteness in
Chile, I reveled in every malodorous current, discoloration, and disorder;
every evidence of otherness and otherwiseness. I loved untied shoes, took
pictures of graffiti, tried to pick up wonderfully vulgar words, and
celebrated ecstatically when, in the financial district of Valparaíso, my
wife and I stumbled upon a mule, fully loaded, tied to a parking meter.
Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia
Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
