October 9: Traversing Santiago

Words of the Day: Mapudungun Edition! (Please excuse the spelling, may be wrong)
ruka- traditional mapuche thatched house
maki- a sacred branch, of both welcome and fertility
machi- shaman, protectoress of the community
trutruka- horn, used to send messages and gather a community
kultrun- drum inscribed with a cross representing the 4 seasons, a number very important to the Mapuche.

Currently holed up in my bed with some sort of unpleasant stomach ailment, I am paying for a day that unexpectedly turned out to be a very interesting experiment in exploring Santiago from población to barrio alto in the span of one day.

Tufts took us on a trip to a Mapuche cultural center in La Pintana, one of the poorer neighborhoods at the very outskirts of Santiago with around a 15% Mapuche population, one of the highest in Santiago. The trip really helped me to understand a bit better where some of the conflicts between indigenous and modern Chilean society stem from. Yesterday, when I had mentioned to my host sister in law that we were going to a Mapuche cultural center, her reaction was something along the lines of "Mapuches all day?!? They scare me- they are so subversive!" Although the comment was uncomfortable for someone used to east coast politically correct speech, it did have a grain of truth to it. "Luchar" (to fight) is a concept that over the last 500 years has becomed mapped onto Mapuche identity as they have battled against the encroachment of Spanish colonizers and for the last 200 or so, the Chilean state.

Our guides took a long time to explain Mapuche cosmovision, dress, sport and music after we were welcomed into the ruca with a ritual for guests. I found it to be incredibly, incredibly beautiful and made me curious to learn more. "God" is conceptualized as energy flows with a duality reflecting both the masculine and feminine. I could write on and on about this, but another concept that is really important to them and has taken on importance politically is the idea that after death, one's "soul" is reunited with the ancestors under the earth. Thus leading to an emphasis on the importance of traditional lands.

They served us a delicious breakfast and lunch of sopaipillas, round donut like foods, mote con huesillos (a traditional drink), intriguing tear shaped bread-like substances made only from wheat, with a spicy sauce, and a rich soup made from different kinds of beans and lentils.

We went to one of the only bi-lingual day care/kindergarten centers in Chile. It was really interesting conceptually, but it was kind of amusing because honestly, there wasn't all that much to see and they kept trying to make us walk into classrooms during nap time, which we kept trying to decline, because the last time I checked, watching strangers sleep is CREEPY!
One thing that we all noticed on the bus ride: some parts of La Pintana had trees in the neighborhoods. It was amazing to see what a difference something so simple made in making the area appear more liveable and less desperate.

Before heading back to the original center to learn some dances, we visited another center in El Bosque, the comuna next door.
A center had been built with 5 ruca, as part of a demand made to the Lagos administration for the construction of places within Santiago to revive traditional culture and practices.
It fell into disrepair because it originally was not utilitized, as the center was seen as been too far removed from nature, as there was little input from the community on its construction. It was eventually rebuilt and renovated. Things like this explain some of the rhetoric against the Mapuches that is occasionally heard from the Chilean middle class; they are always seen as wanting things from the government and never being satisfied with what is given. Not to say it is not deserved, but there are specific cultural expectations that each side does not seem to understand about the demands of the other.
The center is mainly a gathering place for ceremonies and on Sundays as well.

After the prodigous amounts of food that had been consumed during the day, I decided to walk home through Providencia, one of the old centers of wealth in the city and still very upscale. Absolutely gorgeous. I can't express how much I love springtime here.

I had planned to go out to a cumbia concert in Barrio Brazil, our old stomping grounds way back in our Hostelling International days. Brazil is a really cool middle class/hipstery area, mainly with a lot of funky bars that are just starting to come into their own as the weather gets better and better. Anyway, we ended up not having enough tickets for the group. Not wanting to abandon people, we decided to scalp the tickets we did have and use the profits elsewhere.

The reason I'm sick, I'm fairly certain, has much to do with some slightly dubious sopaipillas that were consumed during a long wait for a bus. There's a spot on the bridge over to Bellavista that sells them absurdly cheaply for literally 10 cents and they're often too good to pass up. But the spicy sauce I packed on that wasn't refrigerated might have done the trick. Although it hasn't had the best results in today's case, I sometimes am really glad of my extranjera status because it means I don't have to conform to traditional class expectations. ie I can eat streetfood before going to a relatively upscale club.
Way to go for the American myth.

We decided to meet up with my friend Molly's host sister Javi who wanted to go to a club all the way up in Lo Barnechea, a fairly exclusive comuna WAY up practically in the mountains. Static had a great mix of music and was a lot of fun although it was a little bit more pelolaís than I'm used to in nightlife. Around 5 in the morning when we finally ventured home, we had a wonderful view out over the vastness of the city, twinkling lights for quite a stretch. It was weird to be seeing from above the entire area where we had traversed earlier.

Mapuche Issues in Chile

I realized I've talked about the Mapuche hunger strike a lot in my blog without perhaps giving the best context, socially and historically. This article does a reasonably good job, and it's in English!
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53007

And the Human Rights Watch take, which looks more at legacies from the years of military dictatorship:
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/09/27/chile-amend-anti-terrorism-law-and-military-jurisdiction

I also realized that I've been bandying the phrase "dictatorship" around a lot. By this, I'm referring to the period of military rule by Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990.

August 18: Youth in Revolt

Word of the Day
Parra- student strikes

Santiago was pretty shaken up today, or at least the student age population was.
Chile has a very active student movement which was engaged in strikes in a lot of the campuses. Basically, the student movement is against the policies of current education minister Joaquin Lavín who is attempting to privatize the higher education sistem. While a lot of students are only involved in striking as a way to miss class, in a lot of ways I admire the student movement. While the majority of middle class American students have passively accepted the fact that ours is a higher education system where access to the best schools often means taking on seemingly absurb levels of debt, Chilean students aren't willing to just let educational assistance go without a fight. I've been blessed with a situation that will enable me to leave school with a reasonable amount of debt, but I have tons of friends for whom debt is a constant threat and preoccupation.
Student strikes are pretty normal in Chile though. A couple dozen people got arrested, some of the facultades had classes canceled, including the Public Affairs school. Meaning that I didn't have my econ class! Instead, I got to wander the city aimlessly for a few hours. I'd recently decided to try my hand at making a few photoessays on various themes, since I'm here for so long, and this led to an amusing/slightly scary incident. I was just photographing some buildings and graffiti when I was stopped by a police woman who asked what I was doing. I think what happened is that she thought I was photographing her motorcycle when I had taken an earlier shot. I pretended to be in a photo class that my friends are taking that attempts to explore the city through photography and eventually, this seemed to be acceptable for her. In retrospect, I probably just should have pretended to not understand Spanish. This has been a reasonably good strategy for dealing with people trying to sell me things on the street...
After a few hours, I finally went to my first class of "Copper, Globalization and the New Chilean Economy." It was a little different than I had expected. The professor followed the neoliberal line without deviation and spent a lot of the time bashing Latin America for the way it has managed its economies, which just felt sort of awkward. As someone who's only been involved in international development from the idea of "sustainable development," it was interesting to hear development defined without any people explicitly referred to in the definition: "reaching a organized, efficient and competitive society."
My problem with economics is exactly this: it proposes models are "correct", if you take out most of the real world factors and discount the people you will negatively effect with your policies. Despite the business and econonomics orientation of the class challenging some of my personal beliefs, I'm definitely sticking with the class because I am admittedly weak in my understanding of these areas as demonstrated by my failure to know the difference between Kondratiev, Kitchin, Kaplinsky, Juglar and Kutzenes curves and the economic thoughts of Wagemann, Ortega and Spengler (oy). At least I was ok on Schumpeter and "creative destruction." I was also really intrigued by what I'm pretty sure the professor introduced as the main "thesis" of the class: Asia has "gotten development right," leading to a tremendous need for raw primary materials which, if Latin America plays correctly, can lead it out of poverty. It's an interesting idea, although I'm not entirely sure I wholly agree with it because it disregards environmental impacts. Furthermore, while such a system would undoubtedly raise per capita incomes, without specific policies to address tremendous income inequalities, I don't know how economic stability would be attained in the long term.
I think it will be a good challenge to have a professor who I don't really agree with. Who knows, maybe I'll come out of class spewing the neoliberal gospel :P

On the way home, I ran into another protest, this one for the freedom of Mapuche (Chile's main indigenous group) political prisoners in Plaza Nuñoa, the "town square" of my comuna. I'm not totally sure of the number (around 50?) prisoners who the Mapuche argue are being held on political grounds, have been detained under Law No.18.314, an anti-terror law enacted under Pinochet. 30 Mapuche prisoners have been on a hunger strike since mid-July and the protest was organized to push for their release.This protest stayed peaceful, featuring speeches, traditional dances and a "war yell" as the police watched from a small distance.

This year is such a fascinating time to be in Chile. Between the bi-centennial, the student movement, Mapuche activism, earthquake recovery and struggles surrounding the election of the first right wing president since the dictatorship, the dynanism and conflict of Chilean society is constantly apparent.