Recreating spaces of Mapuche belonging in the city of Santiago

This paper presents a case where history seems to move in fits and starts and circles. Mapuche belonging was erased from Santiago de Chile more than 4 centuries ago by Spanish conquistadors. Now the Mapuche are recreating a sense of belonging in peripheral neighbourhoods of the same city. In the late 1800s the newly independent Chilean republic attempted to complete the Spanish colonial project by forcefully annexing the lands to the south of the Biobío River. This violent taking of Mapuche lands was justified with the terra nullius principle, the legal fiction that Mapuche lands were somehow 'empty'. In recent years the linearity of this version of history has been given a new shape with the displacement of Mapuche off rural lands in the south. Some of those now living in Santiago have begun to build rukas (ancestral Mapuche huts) as cultural and religious centres on 'vacant' state-owned land in the city. Whereas the colonisation of Mapuche lands in the south was based on a story that never really fit, the building of these rukas in Santiago superficially echoes that story but with important differences. According to the story, the Chilean state would have taken 'empty' lands in the south to make them productive. The Mapuche in Santiago, on the other hand, do occupy 'empty' state-owned lands and do make them productive. They request access to informal rubbish tips and fill them with meaningful cultural and religious activities. In this way they create new spaces of Mapuche belonging on small patches of the lands that were taken from their ancestors centuries ago.