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 i 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. ii Dedication For Truscott Kelly, who always believed I’d be “Dr. Kel” one day. iii 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 iv 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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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 viii 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