UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Warrior Spirit: From Invasion to Fusion Music in the Mapuche Territory of Southern Chile Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xg8s85n Author Rekedal, Jacob Eric Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Warrior Spirit: From Invasion to Fusion Music in the Mapuche Territory of Southern Chile A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music by Jacob Eric Rekedal March 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Jonathan Ritter, Chairperson Dr. Deborah Wong Dr. René T.A. Lysloff Dr. Juliet McMullin Dr. Thomas C. Patterson Copyright by Jacob Eric Rekedal 2015 The Dissertation of Jacob Eric Rekedal is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I thank God for the opportunity to do this kind of work. This dissertation bears my name, but it also bears the imprint of many generous individuals and several supporting institutions that made the project possible. A Humanities Graduate Student Research Grant from the University of California, Riverside financed a brief pilot research trip to southern Chile during 2008, as I finished my graduate coursework and prepared my dissertation proposal. From late 2009 until late 2010, I lived in Temuco and conducted fieldwork with a grant from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program. Between March and December of 2011, I continued my fieldwork with a Fulbright IIE grant, including considerable local support from Fulbright’s staff in Chile. When I first arrived in Temuco for a two-week stay during September of 2008, Johanna Pérez of the non-profit organization Fundación Chol-Chol picked me up at the bus station, gave me a tour of the city and a home-cooked meal, and introduced me to the world of Mapuche artesanía. Two years later, she and her colleagues at the Fundación provided key support during my extended research period. During 2010 and 2011, I was fortunate to befriend Danko Mariman, Isabel Cañet, Fabian Marin and Luz Marina Huenchucoy, of the Mapuche organization Kolectivo We Newen (New Force Collective). These young, pathbreaking individuals have informed and inspired my work in a number of ways, evident from the opening paragraphs. I am also grateful to have studied Mapuzugun for two semesters with Kolectivo We Newen, through classes they launched in 2011 as part of a campaign to make the Mapuche language official in Araucanía. iv I owe a debt of gratitude to the poet Erwin Quintupil, who permitted me to attend and document the Mingako Kultural festival in the Mapuche comunidad of Saltapura, and with whom I have shared several fascinating conversations since 2010. I also thank Colelo of the heavy metal group Pewmayén, and now of the group Identidad Mapuche. Upon learning of my interest in Araucanian music, Colelo invited me to performances and expressed a genuine, reciprocal interest in my research. Mapuche hip-hop veteran Jano Weichafe deserves my sincerest thanks for sharing his thoughts about music, activism and the place of hip-hop in Mapuche culture. Jano and Danko made the first comments on the earliest completed sections of this dissertation, which are now published as articles in both Spanish and English. I also thank Juan and Oscar of the hip- hop group Unión de Pobla, who have educated me about the history of regional rap music, and who have inspired audiences since the early days of hip-hop in the cities of Temuco and Padre las Casas. Guitarist Leo Matus deserves special thanks, as do charango virtuoso Javier Fuentes and cellist Francisco “Titi” Aguilar. These musicians, along with a tight-knit group of collaborators, perform in the open air throughout the year in Temuco and other cities. Their stages are street corners, city buses, bars and peñas, and as a result they project with acoustic instruments like few other musicians I have heard. During 2010, Leo instructed me on guitar, including Iberian and Latin American classical pieces, and standards from the Chilean nueva canción repertoire. Rainy winter afternoons spent with Leo, studying next to a wood stove or a space heater, rank among the fondest memories from my first year in Araucanía. v Lafkenche (coastal Mapuche) musician and artisan Hernán Marinao, and venerated Lafkenche poet Lorenzo Aillapán graciously hosted me at their houses and shared enlightening conversations with me during 2010 and 2011. Hernán has remained a good friend, and he honored my family by performing ülkantun when my wife Liliana and I were married. Among local figures in the artistic milieu who are no longer alive, I was privileged to spend time with the remarkable luthier Antonio Rosales, and with the transcontinental poet and activist Alejandro Stuart. Their passing reminds me of the ephemerality of the experiences that so vividly color life and research abroad, but also of the lasting effects that artists exert, even after they are gone. On various dark, chilly nights in Temuco, I ventured out to bars to hear local hip- hop, and on certain occasions I struck up conversations which led to interviews and further hanging out. In this context, I reflect fondly upon interactions with MC Thomaz Lobos Ponce, and members of the groups Núcleo 441 and Padrela. These lyricists, who belong to a younger generation that learned from rappers such as Oscar and Juan of Unión de Pobla, invited me to their houses, walked me around their neighborhoods, and talked enthusiastically about their art. I am grateful as well for my friendships with singer-songwriter Diego Inostroza, and with Andrés Salvadores and Camila Brahm, who accepted me with open arms and made me feel at home in Temuco. Along with roughly thirty other people, these close friends helped mark the peak of my social life during fieldwork by throwing me an unforgettable thirtieth birthday party in 2011. vi I have been fortunate to study with a number of excellent academic mentors in recent years. At Union College, historian Teresa Meade introduced me to fieldwork- based research in the Southern Cone, and encouraged me to work across disciplines and pursue my own approach to scholarship. During my final year as an undergraduate, Union hired their first ethnomusicologist, Jennifer Matsue, who kindled my interest in her field even though I was too near the end of my course of study to enroll in her classes. Together with Victoria Martinez from Union’s Modern Languages Department, Professor Matsue guided me through a special thesis project while I pursued a master’s degree in teaching at Union Graduate College in 2005-2006, and she offered indispensable advice about starting a career in ethnomusicology. My mentors at UCR have provided unwavering support, and have demonstrated a singular degree of professionalism that I can only hope has rubbed off on me during my years as their student. Jonathan Ritter, my advisor and committee chair, has set a high bar with his own teaching and writing on music, violence and memory in Peru, and he consistently offers his students the attention necessary for them to strive toward his standards. Deborah Wong and René T.A. Lysloff, who have equally high standards, have provoked me to think ethnomusicologically through a striking range of paradigms, including globalization, postcolonialism, interculturalism, feminism, improvisation, critical race studies and postmodernism. Anthropologists Juliet McMullin and Thomas C. Patterson kindly accepted me in their graduate seminars on ethnographic methods, the body, and core anthropological theory at UCR during 2008 and 2009, and I am honored to have them as committee members. vii My peers at UCR, particularly Jacky Avila, Shawn Mollenhauer and Miles Shrewsbery, made graduate school all the more remarkable by lacing it with the deep bonds of lasting friendship. These companions are now scattered in different places, each doing something interesting, but we continue to keep tabs on one another and to rejoice in life together from a distance. In 2012, my wife and I developed a close bond with Scott and Mary Crago, who lived in Temuco while Scott researched his Ph.D. dissertation in history. In addition to a lot of good memories, I thank Scott for his editing skills, which have proven valuable to my own dissertation. In Chile, I am thankful to Juan José “Juanjo” Gutiérrez of the Universidad de la Frontera (UFRO) in Temuco. In 2012 Juanjo furnished me with a room and whatever resources he had available, so that I could teach an elective course entitled “Introducción a la Etnomusicología” (Introduction to Ethnomusicology) through the UFRO’s Centro de Innovación Profesional (Center for Professional Innovation). Juanjo also invited me to give a TEDxUFRO talk in January of 2014, the preparation for which included a rapid, intense course in public speaking that I will not soon forget. Juanjo’s son Felipe has also been a kind friend and an inspiration, and it has been exciting to watch him come into his own as a journalist and author. I first met Felipe independently of Juanjo, at Kolectivo We Newen’s Mapuzugun class in 2011, and he promptly introduced me to Alejandro Stuart and Kolectivo Espiral. These experiences in many ways defined my second year of fieldwork, and have subsequently shaped my network of friends and colleagues in Temuco. viii I also thank Carlos del Valle, Dean of the Facultad de Educación, Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades (Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Humanities) at the UFRO, who served attentively as my host professor during my Fulbright IIE grant period in 2011, and who also permitted me to teach a semester of “Introducción a la Etnomusicología” to his undergraduate students. My two semesters of teaching in 2012 acquainted me more closely with the Chilean university system and afforded me the opportunity to present a novel topic in Araucanía.