Joanna Crow

MAPUCHE POETRY IN POST-DICTATORSHIP

CHILE: CONFRONTING THE DILEMMAS

OF NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM

I ask all Chileans . . . to renew their efforts to value and develop our multiculturalidentity, because a diversity which enriches [Chile] can help us to stand out intoday’s global concert of nations . . . . There is a space here for everyone, foreverybody’s dreams. For that reason I want to conclude by sharing the thoughtsexpressed by Chihuailaf. He says: ‘Through the power of memory the land lives on/and in her the blood of our ancestors./ Can you see, can you see why/ he asks/ I stillwant to dream in this valley?’ Today that valley is called Chile and, because it iscalled Chile, we all dream of a shared goal, originating from our diverse roots whichcame together hundreds of years ago to forge the fatherland we have today.(Ricardo Lagos, thanking the Comision de Verdad Historica y Nuevo Trato de los PueblosIndıgenas for its final report, La Moneda, Santiago, 28 October 2003)1

Elicura Chihuailaf, quoted by then President Ricardo Lagos, is the best known ofChile’s Mapuche poets. The publication of his first bilingual (Mapuzungun and Spanish)work in 1988, together with the literary debut of Leonel Lienlaf (mentioned earlier inLagos’s speech) in 1989 marked the beginning of a boom in Mapuche poetry(Vicuna, 1998). From this point on, in conjunction with Chile’s return to democracyand a resurgence of indigenous literatures throughout Latin America, Mapuche poets’writings became widely available in Chilean bookstores; they also began to circulateinternationally (through translated print versions and, later, through the Internet).Chihuailaf and Lienlaf have received several national literary awards, they have beengiven state funding for some of their projects and a number of their poems have beenreproduced in school textbooks.2 Various cultural reviews, literary journals andbibliographical studies have included or referenced their poetry; it is also the subject ofa growing number of academic theses.3 Keen to keep up with such developments in theacademy, the Chilean press has published numerous interviews with the writers andmany glowing reviews of their books.

So well established were Chihuailaf and Lienlaf by 2003 that few would have beensurprised to hear President Lagos incorporate them into his words of thanks to theHistorical Truth Commission. Clearly, Lagos felt that their poetry and the story ofliterary success that accompanied it provided him with the perfect opportunity toapplaud Chile’s cultural and ethnic diversity. Such proclamations stand in stark contrastto the unitary, assimilatory nationalist discourse of the Pinochet regime (perhaps bestencapsulated in the statement of the Minister of Agriculture in 1978: ‘there are noIndians in Chile, they are all Chileans!’4) and thus, together with various statementsmade by previous Concertacion leaders, confirm a key shift in official identity

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 August 2008, pp. 221-240

ISSN 1356-9325/print 1469-9575 online q 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13569320802228062

discourses. With indigenous peoples and their distinctive cultural practices nowpresent as an integral part of the Chilean national imaginary, that nation is deemed bymany people, including literary critics, to be truly inclusive – a beacon of democracyand multicultural modernity.

However, in the context of ongoing debates about the constitutional recognition ofindigenous peoples (the Truth Commission recommended such changes but Lagos wasunable to get Congress to approve them) and the increasingly violent land conflicts insouthern Chile (during Lagos’s presidency scores of Mapuche community leaders wereimprisoned using anti-terrorist legislation enacted by the Pinochet regime), Lagos’squotation and consumption of Mapuche poetry becomes highly problematic. Far fromendorsing the writers’ political cause, it constitutes little more than aestheticappreciation, ideological manipulation (drawing on a romantic image of the patrioticMapuche, akin to that adopted by post-independence governments), and self-exculpation. As is apparent in the last few lines of the speech, Lagos ignored the politicalprotest in Chihauilaf’s poetry; rather, he appropriated it to project a harmonious imageof the country’s multicultural reality, when it is highly unlikely that the poet wouldever endorse Mapuche territory being ‘renamed Chile’ in such a celebratorymanner. Instead of being used to debate ethnic conflict and the very real problems of thepresent, Chihuailaf and Lienlaf are deployed as an alibi against ethnic and racialdiscrimination in Chile.

This article5 analyses the work of four Mapuche poets: the aforementionedChihuailaf (1953–) and Lienlaf (1969–); and two more recent arrivals on the literaryscene, Cesar Millahueique (1961–) and David Aninir (1970–). I have chosen thesefour, out of a total of approximately 30 Mapuche writers who are publishing in Chiletoday (Carter, 2004: 16), because they provide for a useful comparative analysis, interms of their personal histories, their poetic production and their reception in officialliterary circles. Chihuailaf and Lienlaf are bilingual poets, who write their verses inMapuzungun and Spanish. They were both born in rural communities in southernChile; nowadays they spend much time in Chile’s urban centres, but they still havehomes in rural areas and try to visit their families’ communities as often as they can.Millahueique and Aninir, in contrast, have grown up in urban centres (Osorno andSantiago respectively) and now live in Santiago. Neither can speak Mapuzungun.Millahueique and Aninir have received an increasing amount of attention in the lastthree or four years, particularly in the off-mainstream literary community, but onecould reasonably argue that they remain eclipsed by Chihuailaf and Lienlaf. To dateneither Millahueique nor Aninir has been awarded any literary prizes, few references totheir work can be found in the national newspapers and academic specialists have rarelymentioned them.

Whilst thinking about the distinctive reception of these writers’ works, I wasstruck by the many ways in which Mapuche poetry epitomized the provocative but alsohighly compelling concept of the ‘indio permitido’, developed by Charles Hale andRosamel Millaman (Hale, 2004; Hale and Millaman, 2006). This sociopoliticalcategory evokes past narratives of the noble/ignoble savage in the context of currentdebates about the limits of the neoliberal state’s commitment to multicultural reform.Drawing on his knowledge of indigenous politics in Guatemala, Hale argues that officialdiscourses of multiculturalism provide novel spaces for acquiring rights, but that,combined with an aggressively pro-market, pro-capital agenda, these rights become

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limited to the ‘authorized’ or domesticated Indian (Hale, 2004: 19). The latter haslearnt that ‘certain rights [by which Hale means cultural rights] are to be enjoyed on theimplicit condition that others [by which he means economic, political and territorialrights] will not be raised’ (ibid.: 18). Other Indians who refuse to comply with suchconditions – who challenge the authority and legitimacy of the state, who engage inviolent protests over land and resources – are excluded from the benefits ofmulticultural reform; they are treated as the ‘undeserving, dysfunctional, Other’(ibid.: 19).

Millaman, a Mapuche activist and intellectual, raises some interesting pointsregarding the relevance of the term to Chile, where there has – in his words – been‘relative silence and inaction on issues of race and culture’ (Hale and Millaman, 2006:285). As noted above, the Chilean congress has yet to grant constitutional recognitionto indigenous peoples, and it has refused to sign the International Labour OrganisationConvention 169 concerning indigenous peoples’ socioeconomic rights. However,Millaman claims that with the new Indigenous Law of 1993, the creation of theNational Indigenous Development Council (CONADI) and the implementation ofimportant intercultural education and health programmes there has been an ‘advance,albeit halting and still limited, toward the construction of a Chilean indio permitido’(ibid.: 286). Focusing on Mapuche participation in local politics (as mayors whobecome part of the state apparatus), he reveals how difficult it is to subvert thecharacteristics of the indio permitido, although he insightfully stresses that while the indiopermitido may undermine more radical Mapuche demands, such as territorialautonomy, the latter would have no viability were it not for the ‘channels of resourcesand legitimacy’ opened up by the former in the first place (ibid.: 293).

Chihuailaf and Lienlaf, through bilingual verse that re-projects a glorious Mapuchepast and a utopian rural community, have been accorded the place of indio permitidowithin the Chilean literary canon. Their poetry is deemed marketable and desirable; it isalso perceived as useful for the government’s official discourse of multiculturalism.This undoubtedly has its advantages for the authors, in terms of increased coverage andfunding opportunities, and it could be argued that they invite this kind of reception.However, one can also see how their writings are misread (perhaps deliberately)by critics, and thus become constrained within the parameters laid down by the officialliterary establishment. They become incorporated into dominant identity discourses,which invoke a romanticized static version of ‘Mapuche-ness’ to avow Chile’suniqueness in an increasingly globalized world. Their political protest (not obvious butnonetheless present in the poetry and far more overt in some of their other writingsand performances) against state violence and various development projects in the southis sidelined; as shown by Lagos’s speech, they are allowed to promote a symbolicassertion of Mapuche identity as long as it does not interfere with questions ofsovereignty and property relations.

Such protest is less easily sidelined in the work of Millahueique and Aninir. Theirdistinctly politicized, urban and mainly Spanish verse, which openly denouncesthe state’s neoliberal agenda, leads them to be seen as Hale’s more ‘conflict prone’Indian – the ‘dysfunctional, other’. It is not deemed ‘authentically’ indigenous by theliterary establishment and it has no ‘use’ for the Chilean state. Nonetheless, in line withthe paradox outlined by Millaman, they are still visible and audible in contemporaryChile, even if their audience and readership is relatively small, and this is precisely

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because of the spaces opened up by officially accepted writers such as Chihuailaf andLienlaf.

Thus, an exploration of Mapuche poetry largely confirms both the limits and theparadoxes of neoliberal multiculturalism, as outlined by Hale and Millaman. It does,however, add one extra angle to the debate. Literary creation, with its multiple andcontested meanings, resists the rigid positioning and definitions that political activism andthe political machinery can require. While Chihuailaf and Lienlaf might be misread bycritics, and used to promote a very different version of ‘Mapuche-ness’ from the ones thatthey themselves may have in mind, their writings – in allowing for different readings andconstantly pushing the boundaries of the category of the indio permitido – manage to exceedsuch appropriations. These two poets, together with Millahueique and Aninir, therebygreatly contribute to debates about neoliberal multiculturalism in contemporary Chile.Their work and its reception show how they are constrained by the hegemonic cultural,economic and political system that is neoliberalism, but also how they challenge it.

Contested narratives

The poets discussed here provide their versions of Mapuche history, recording thememories of their ancestors and narrating the suffering of their people as they struggledagainst the Spanish conquistadores and, later, the Chilean state. In ‘El espıritu de Lautaro’(1989) Lienlaf remembers one of the legendary Mapuche warriors of the sixteenthcentury, who defended his people’s lands against Pedro de Valdivia’s invading army:

El espıritu de Lautarocamina cerca de mi corazonmirandoescuchandollamandome todas las mananas.

Lautaro viene a buscarme,a buscar a su gentepara luchar con el espırituy el canto.

[The ghost of Lautaro/ walks near my heart/ watching/ listening/ callingme each morning.// Lautaro comes looking for me/ looking for hispeople/ to struggle with spirit/ with song. Vicuna. Trans. Bierhorst, 1998: 71]

The spirit (the soul, the memory) of Lautaro lives on in what was Mapuche territory,encouraging his descendants to continue their fight for independence in present-dayChile – it/he stays close by the poet’s ‘heart’, the basic generator of life (in this case,life of the Mapuche people). Lienlaf is called upon to continue Lautaro’s strugglethrough ‘song’, an allusion, perhaps, to Mapuche ancestral tradition and/or to thepolitical function of poetry: spoken out loud, it communicates a ‘message’ to morepeople; it becomes a tool allowing him to rise up in a rebellion, without the violence orbloodshed of Lautaro’s time.

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According to literary critic Gilberto Trivinos, Lienlaf’s poem perpetuates thefascination long held by Chileans for the ‘permanent war’ between the Spanish andthe Mapuche (1996: 5). The military conflict between the two peoples is part of thefounding narrative of the nation, and a poem which mythologizes the historical figure ofLautaro is, to be sure, easily appropriated as part of such a narrative. However, we canalso see how Lienlaf resists the ventriloquism of Chilean historiographical and literarytraditions that make indigenous voices speak on behalf of the nation. He draws on thedominant discourse of romantic nationalism but only in order to subvert it: as indicatedabove, he uses it to inscribe difference (Mapuche autonomy) rather than to project aunified (Chilean) identity.

In ‘Le sacaron la piel’ (1989), Lienlaf turns to the military campaigns of the latenineteenth century, through which Mapuche people and their territory weredefinitively incorporated into the Chilean state. Traditionally, governments (throughofficial sites such as museums and schools) have presented these campaigns as peacefuland unproblematic. Lienlaf takes a very different approach, depicting a violent invasionin which the Mapuche laid claim to the land with their blood:

Le sacaron la piel de la espalday cortaron su cabeza.A nuestro valiente Cacique!Y la piel de su espaldala usaron de banderay su cabeza la amarraron a la cintura.

Vamos llorando y nuestra sangreriega la tierra . . .

[They tore the skin off his back/ and cut off his head./ Of our brave leader!And the skin of his back/ they used for a flag/ and his head they tied to a belt.We leave crying and our blood/ soaks the land . . . ]

The Mapuche laid claim to the land with their blood, and the land – soaked in theirblood – could then act as testimony to their suffering. The third-person plural (thosewho beheaded and skinned the cacique) seems to include the Spanish and the Chileans,thereby linking the two colonizing enterprises. But perhaps the narrative componentthat most stands out here is the dismemberment of the cacique, which can be readliterally (we know that atrocities were committed by the Chilean army during theoccupation campaigns, and by the Spanish during the colonial wars) but alsofiguratively. One could argue that Lienlaf tells a story of a nation being forged throughand of the body parts of assassinated Indians: the Mapuche nation, personified by thecacique, has been merged into the Chilean nation; the first had to be physically andterritorially dismembered in order for the second to flourish. Such analysis points,again, to Lienlaf’s appropriation of nationalist discourse but in order to both denounceand undermine it – his work, more broadly, depicts a Mapuche people who have beenunder constant attack but who have managed to survive.

Chihuailaf makes numerous references to the occupation campaigns in his poetry.‘Es otro el invierno que en mis ojos llora’ (1995) depicts his grandparents, sat around

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the fire, recalling those who died on the battlefields: ‘mueven los tristes/ labios deinvierno/ y nos recuerdan a nuestros/ muertos y desaparecidos’ [they move their/ sadwinter lips/ and remind us of our/ dead and disappeared]. Together with its emphasison collective memory and the importance of listening to the stories of our ancestors(Chihuailaf has previously defined poetry as the art of listening to the ancestral word),the poem conveys an overwhelming sense of sadness, pain and loss.6 His essay Recadoconfidencial a los chilenos (1999), possibly a conscious echo of Gabriela Mistral’s Recadoscontando a Chile, engages all the more explicitly with the violence underlying thehistorical relationship between the Mapuche and the state. Contesting the official,neutral definition of ‘reducciones’ (Mapuche reservations) as legally constitutedcommunities established in the post-occupation period, Chihuailaf describes howMapuche people were attacked in their homes, ‘punished, tortured and transferred’ toa distant location, or sometimes simply murdered (1999: 27).

Millahueique’s recent book Oratorio al senor de Pucatrihue (2004), perhaps bestdescribed as poetic prose rather than poetry per se, also challenges the state-sanctionednarratives of nation-building. In ‘Regle’ (the seventh of 21 dreams) he imagines theexperience of his forebears’ community during the early stages of the occupation process:

Te acuerdas de las noches de 1850, cuando venıas al galope junto a la fuerzapublica; te acuerdas de las terribles noches de asedio, cuando carabina en manocorrıas los cercos y firmabas papeles que llevaban tu nombre . . .en esa noche sone contigo hasta que mi guardian me levanto a palos y me dijoesos campos ya no pertenencen!. . .y luego me empujo al piso y me revolco en las excretas de los borrachos de laciudad que se presentıa . . .luego me sacarony me llevaron a una sala que olıa a clorofomo y me injectaron las venascuando quise patear a mis enemigos los grilletes me lo impidieron. (2004: 25)

[You remember the nights of 1850 when you came at a gallop with the police; youremember the terrible nights of siege, when with a gun in hand you put up fencesand signed papers with your name . . .[T]hat night I dreamt of you until the guard woke me, beating me, and told me –these lands no longer belong to you! And then he knocked me to the floor andtrampled me in the excrement of the city’s drunks . . . . Afterwards, they took meto a room that smelt of chloroform and injected me through the veinswhen I wanted to kick out at my enemies the shackles prevented me.]

The words ‘te acuerdas’ are reminiscent of the poetry written by Pablo Neruda duringthe Spanish Civil War, particularly ‘Explico algunas cosas’, in which calls he out to hisdead and exiled friends, Rafael Alberdi and Federico Garcıa Lorca, to remember thetranquillity of Madrid before the Nationalist bombing campaign (‘Te acuerdas,Rafael?/ Federico, te acuerdas/ debajo de la tierra . . . ?’). Yet here Millahueique is notspeaking to the victims of the violence; instead he is speaking to Teofilo Grob, one ofthe perpetrators of the violence (and key beneficiaries of the occupation campaigns).Nor does he question whether the aggressors remember, but rather states it as fact.Like Chihuailaf, and Neruda before him, Millahueique allows the memory of suffering

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and loss to live on through his verse. His book jumps between the present (the shootingof Mapuche political activist Alex Lemun), the recent past (the disappeared of thedictatorship) and the nineteenth century, demonstrating the continuing violence usedagainst the Mapuche, particularly when they try to defend their much-coveted lands.It denounces Chilean occupation of the southern regions as illegitimate, constantlyreaffirming a strong sense of Mapuche autonomy and territoriality: it evokes therespect many Mapuche people continue to hold for their traditional political authoritiesand the history behind current political campaigns to recover their ancestral lands(to counter the dominant right-wing press which portrays the land conflict as a recentphenomenon instigated by ‘terrorists’).

The Mapuche periodical Azkintuwe is keen to highlight poets’ attacks on Chilean statepolicy (e.g. Carter, 2004); literary critics are not. They have virtually ignoredMillahueique’s Oratorio al senor de Pucatrihue and they have paid little attention toChihuailaf’s Recado confidencial.7 Analyses of the supposedly more authentic(rural, traditional) poetry recognize its ‘voice of protest’ against the exploitation,marginalization and repression suffered by Mapuche people, but they rarelyacknowledge it as a key theme; if they do, there is very little context or detailprovided. The ‘voice of protest’ tends to be linked to Mapuche society’s ‘attitude ofresistance’, ‘culture of resistance’ or ‘discourse of resistance’ (Hugo Carrasco, 1993,2002; Ivan Carrasco, 1993; Barrenechea, 2002), as if such an ‘attitude’ or ‘culture’, asopposed to specific state actions, were enough to explain it. (Unsurprisingly, suchterminology has been rejected by Chihuailaf, who argues that it reduces Mapuche cultureto a subculture, inferior to the culture of the dominant society that it is resisting, andrefuses to appreciate cultures in their plurality (1999: 49)). Similarly, Chilean criticsmake frequent allusions to the poetry’s attempts to recover ancestral memory, but thecontent of such memory is left rather vague. This is perhaps because critics do not wantto dwell on the history of conflict, particularly given the contemporary situation: policeviolence against Mapuche political activists, confrontations between Mapuche protestersand forestry companies/landowners, and hunger strikes by the Mapuche leaders beingheld in prison on charges of terrorism. They tend to separate the writers from suchcontroversies and – as will be shown below – to concentrate, instead, on Mapuchecultural identity.

Orality and identity

One of the features of Mapuche literary expression that particularly interests critics is itswritten form; they class it as a significant ‘rupture with tradition’ and therefore highlyproblematic. Mapuche poetry dates back to at least the conquest period (Montecinos,1992), but – until the twentieth century – it was predominantly oral, performed asimprovised songs and tales, or more structured narratives passed down through thegenerations, and contemporary poets evidently draw much inspiration from thistradition. There are, however, many who believe that writing has destroyed traditionalindigenous literary creation (Fierro Bustos and Geeregat, 2000). Perhaps more signi-ficantly, writing is linked to Spanish colonization and – more recently – neo-colonialrelations between the Mapuche and the Chilean state. (It was, after all, the written word,in the form of state decrees, land titles and sales contracts that caused their people to lose

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increasing amounts of land during the twentieth century). These negative associationsmean that writing tends to be posited as ‘anti-indigenous’, yet Mapuche poets –rejecting the false polarity between the oral and the written that Lienhard identifies withregard to indigenous literatures in Mexico (1992) – wish to lay claim to writing as anappropriate form of expression for contemporary Mapuche.

‘Rebelion’ by Lienlaf (1989) is the most frequently cited poem when criticsponder the meaning of writing for Mapuche culture:

Mis manos no quisieron escribirlas palabrasde un profesor viejo.

Mi mano se nego a escribiraquello que no me pertenecıaMe dijo:‘debes ser el silencio que nace’.

Mi manome dijo que el mundono se podıa escribir.

[My hands refused to write/ the words/ of an old teacher.// My hand would notwrite/ what wasn’t my own/ He said to me/ ‘you must be the rising silence’.//My hand/ told me the world/ would not be written down. Bierhorst, 1998: 67]

It denotes a dialogue between the poet and his hand (‘my hand/ told me . . . ’), a handwith human traits – it speaks, it can refuse to write, it has autonomous knowledge –and raises important questions about the ownership of language (of words) and thepolitics of language. Silence is obviously a key theme of the poem, but its meaning isnot entirely clear. The poet is silent, literally without words, because his hand refusesto write the words of the ‘old teacher’ – in this sense, he has been silenced; he cannotcommunicate (at least in the terms determined by the teacher, who is surely symbolicof the education system and its ‘Chileanizing’ intent). Yet, the silence is also positive,for it is emblematic of resistance (he has tried using the words of the teacher, but nowrefuses; his is a silence that ‘is being born’ in opposition to official teaching doctrine);he can communicate – he can communicate his rebellion through silence.

Hugo Carrasco, considered one of ‘the’ academic authorities on Mapuche poetry,uses this poem to reinforce the opposition between oral expression and writing.According to Carrasco’s reading of the poem (1993: 85), Lienlaf denies the possibilityof being able to present his view of the world in writing. Lienlaf’s silence is anindication, Carrasco says, of his determination to reject writing and his defence oforality as intrinsic to Mapuche identity. Ivan Carrasco agrees with his brother’sinterpretation, outlining the series of negations that he sees in the poem, which present‘Mapuche’ and ‘huinca’ (Chilean, Spanish, foreign) cultures as inherently antagonistic(1996: 30). To his mind, the silence is linked to Lienlaf’s search for ‘intraculturality’(ibid.: 33). In many of his articles on Mapuche poetry, Ivan Carrasco insists on thedistinction between ‘intracultural’ and ‘intercultural’, arguing that the poets might try

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to be ‘intracultural’ (defending lo propio and resisting external influences) but thatultimately they cannot help being ‘intercultural’ (mixing with other cultures, andappropriating certain practices of these other cultures). The poets themselves never usesuch terms, and would balk at their supposed ‘intracultural’ desires; for them,Mapuche society has always been intercultural.

There is undoubtedly a tension in ‘Rebelion’ between orality and writing, atension between Lienlaf’s hand and the rest of his body, which Lienlaf fullyacknowledges and makes the focal point of the poem, but this is not necessarily thesame as to say that Lienlaf categorically rejects writing. He employs the written wordto think about the problems involved in writing (i.e. the fact that some people, whencompelled to write, find that their thoughts cannot be confined to a written page).He is not silent on the issue; he is debating it and engaging with its complexities.

Lienlaf’s literary trajectory and the comments he has made in interviews supportthe argument that his relationship with writing is a difficult, although not entirelyhostile one. He once said that writing takes a great deal of creative freedom away fromthe poet:

When you leave Mapuzungun imprinted on paper it is transformed into somethinghard, almost as if it were startled, without letting the words follow their [natural]course. Orality allows you to vary the meaning [of a poem]; writing does not.(Quoted in Vicuna, 1998: 61)

And he claims that ‘almost 80 percent of [his] work is geared toward oral expression’(quoted in Osorio, 2002a). Until 2003, when he published Palabra sonada, Se hadespertado el ave en mi corazon (1989) was his only individual written work. For manyyears now he has been active in the Native Language Programme for Urban Areas.He has also produced several compact discs, such as Canto y poesıa mapuche (1998), andbeen involved in a number of documentary films (doing the voiceover, writing thescript) that protest against commercial lumbering and hydroelectric developmentprojects in southern Chile. (I have yet to find any criticism of Lienlaf’s poeticproduction that engages with these films.) That Lienlaf priorities oral expression doesnot make him ‘anti-writing’, however. He has only two individual books of poetry tohis name, but he is co-author of several other written works.8 Furthermore, he hasfrequently acknowledged how excited he was when he first saw his verses in print: heconsidered it ‘a good way of reaching people’, especially the average Chile (quoted inOsorio, 2002a). To restate, then, writing is a double-edged sword for Lienlaf: herecognizes its disadvantages but also its benefits.

Significantly, dilemmas concerning the written word are not just an ‘Indian’problem. The literary theorist Terry Eagleton has noted the exasperation felt bycreative writers everywhere when they are forced to commit their thoughts to theimpersonal, lifeless medium of print (Eagleton, 1996: 113). Nor is it only indigenousMapuche writers that use oral forms to express themselves: oral-performativeelements have come to be an integral part of non-indigenous poetic productionthroughout Latin America, not least as a response to the continued high rates ofilliteracy. In addition, and contrary to assertions by Hugo Carrasco (1993: 75),Mapuche poetry shows that oral traditions do not have to be left to one side in theprocess of writing. It is not always a case of choosing one or the other, for orality can

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be re-projected through the written word. As commented by Mapuche critics ArielAntillanca, Clorinda Cuminao and Cesar Loncon, ‘[Writing] is way of documentingtestimonies which are vital for our reconstruction as a people, without forgetting themultiple riches of oral tales that are full of emotion and feeling’ (2000: 14).

Chihuailaf, who has published six books to date and written scores of newspaperand journal articles, is fully aware of such (potential) overlaps; indeed, he refers to hisown writing as ‘oralitura’ (Chihuailaf, 1992). There are numerous different ways inwhich the orality of Chihuailaf’s verse is expressed, but perhaps the most salient is hisincorporation of plural voices. For example, in ‘Ruego en las paredes rocosas del cielo’(1995), it is the machi [shaman, faith healer] who talks to us; in ‘Ası transcurren missuenos, mis visiones’ (1995) his ancestors explain the sounds of the kultrun [the sacreddrum]; in ‘Para sanarte vine’ (1995) we hear the voice of the canelo tree; and in Recadoconfidencial a los chilenos (1999) it is the words of Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral thatstand out.

Several intellectuals – Mapuche and non-Mapuche – have criticized Chihuailaf forconstantly insisting on the ‘oral source’ of his work. At a conference in Temuco in2003 French anthropologist Andre Menard described Chihuailaf’s attitude ashypocritical.9 He reproached the poet for his repetitive allusions to evenings spent‘around the fire’ with his parents and grandparents, and his apparent refusal to admitthe importance of writing for him, his family and Mapuche society more generally.When Mapuche poet and critic Jaime Huenun was asked in an interview about‘oralitura’, he responded rather disparagingly:

If [Chihuailaf] thought it necessary to describe his literary work and perhaps that ofother indigenous authors so specifically and separately as oralitura, well, he hasevery right . . . . My own work does not fit in with such categories . . . . I received abook-based education which I value and I’m not going to ignore this in order topromote myself as one more representative of a supposedly quintessential,uncontaminated, agrarian and oral Mapuche [culture]. (Quoted in Osorio, 2002b)

Chihuailaf would undoubtedly refute such criticisms, for the last thing he wants to do ispresent Mapuche culture as ‘uncontaminated’. He repeatedly stresses how adaptableand flexible Mapuche society has always been, relating his people’s contemporary useof writing to the war strategies developed by the legendary heroes of the sixteenthcentury: ‘Lautaro took that machine, the horse, but at his own pace and with hisown style, and he managed to change history’ (quoted in El Mercurio, 6 August 1999).He rejects the idea – asserted by literary critics such as Hugo Carrasco (2002: 90) –that writing is essentially European and that when it is written down Mapuche poetryconsequently loses its ‘Mapuche character’: how can the ‘Mapuche-ness’ of writing orany other modern means of communication be contested, he once asked, when‘nobody stops being Chilean because they use a computer’ (quoted in Moreno, 1994).Moreover, Chihuailaf is the first to insist just how important writing is to the Mapuchepolitical struggle: in his own words it is ‘one of greatest ways to dignify our people, tokeep and recover . . . by and for ourselves the soul of our people’ (quoted in Vicuna,1998: 27).

Yet, there is something in the recriminations outlined above; Chihuailaf doesconstantly emphasize, perhaps even exaggerate, the oral nature of his work. Does he do

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so because that is what is expected of him? Is he responding to others’ presumptions asto what is ‘authentically’ Mapuche, despite criticizing such presumptions? Is henegotiating with the notion of the indio autentico in order to gain access to a place(critical acceptance) from which he can then speak? (It is a difficult game to play: to bedeemed an indio permitido he needs, as Hale says, to ‘pass the test of modernity’ –according to Ivan Carrasco, the adoption of the written word is indicative of a ‘newMapuche identity, open to history and modernity’ (2000: 46), as if Mapuche peoplehad never been capable of change before – but at the same time it is the premodernaspects of Mapuche culture that critics want to see in the literature, in order torecognize its ‘Mapuche-ness’). I raise rather than try to answer these questions here,because they provide a useful insight into one of the dilemmas faced by Mapuche poets:how to successfully challenge the rigid distinction between writing and orality, wheninfluential critics (and probably many other readers too) continue to construct them asopposites, and when being seen to be ‘truly’ Mapuche helps to get your work publishedand accepted by mainstream society.

The use of language

That Mapuche poetry is written in Spanish has also been the cause of much debate.Spanish, like writing, can be seen as an instrument of domination: for most of thetwentieth century the Chilean state tried to impose the Spanish language on indigenouspeoples through the education system, an aim which it largely achieved. In the early1900s most Mapuche were still fluent in Mapuzungun; many were monolingual. Onehundred years later, most Mapuche can speak Spanish and less than 20% claim to befluent in Mapuzungun (Droguett, 2002). In an attempt to reverse this decline,the state’s multicultural project now promotes the right of Mapuche children to beeducated in their native language.

In conjunction with such state initiatives, Chihuailaf and Lienlaf have been able touse their poetry to reassert the value of Mapuzungun: their verses, written inMapuzungun and Spanish, are now included in school text books. Critics recognizethat these poets have helped to revitalize their native language, but they often showmore interest in what is lost when the poetry is written in Spanish. According toChilean anthropologist Pedro Mege Rosso, ‘the slavery of Spanish prohibits theMapuche meaning [of words] being fully liberated’ (Lienlaf and Mege Rosso 2000: 74)and Juan Fierro Bustos has construed Lienlaf’s use of graphic drawings alongside hispoems as an attempt to counter such limitations (1990: 255). Lienlaf himself hasacknowledged that there are indeed problems: ‘Perhaps the most difficult aspect oftranslation’, he explained to one journalist, is ‘pinning down a language in which thesacred is fact and trying to ensure that in Spanish it does not sound merely romantic ormagical’ (quoted in El Mercurio, 20 July 2003). Despite the difficulties, however, hecontinues to write in Spanish because it makes his work more accessible, and thusenables him to ‘denounce the situation of his people’ more effectively (quoted inSwinburn, 1989). In this sense, Spanish – like writing – becomes a zone of struggle,rather than a mere instrument of domination: Chihuailaf and Lienlaf have demonstratedthat Mapuzungun is a vibrant language but they have also shown that it is possible tocommunicate their feelings, their demands and their Mapuche identity in Spanish.

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Alternating and therefore blurring the boundaries between ‘official’ (dominant, Spanish)and ‘unofficial’ (traditional, Mapuche) practices, their poetry is a useful illustration ofLienhard’s point about marginal sectors’ attitude of ‘relative resistance’ (1997: 195).He argues that the debate as to whether indigenous peoples generally resistdominant cultural practice or accept assimilation into it is stale and unhelpful; we needto recognize that they choose ‘in each situation or concrete proposition, the mostadequate practice’ (ibid.).10

What happens, though, to those poets who cannot write in Mapuzungun? Theirwritings are undoubtedly less appreciated by dominant society than that ofChihuailaf and Lienlaf. They find it far more difficult to get their work published;neither Aninir nor Millahueique was contracted by mainstream publishing housesuntil their verses could be translated into Mapunzungun (Jaime Huenun made thispossible in 2003, when, with the help of Victor Sıfuentes, he put together abilingual anthology entitled 20 poetas mapuches contemporaneos). But it is not onlymainstream society that equates ‘being Mapuche’ with fluency in Mapuzungun.Millahueique once told me how Mapuche intellectuals and artists are often criticizedby other Mapuche for not speaking/writing in Mapuzungun (personal interview,6 February 2003) and I witnessed this first hand at a poetry recital in Valparaiso inDecember 2002, when a Mapuche woman in the audience stood up and berated thefour speakers (Jaime Huenun, Elsa Mora Curriao, Pablo Huirimilla and BernardoColipan) for reading their verses in Spanish: ‘Were they ashamed of their ownlanguage?’, she shouted.

When, in a recent interview, Aninir was asked whether he spoke Mapuzungun heresponded by mimicking his detractors: ‘He doesn’t know how to speak Mapunzugunand yet he calls himself a Mapuche poet’ (Muga, 2005: 16). Aninir does not write inMapuzungun because, like thousands of other Mapuche who have been brought up inthe poor neighbourhoods of Santiago, Spanish is his first language. This is not to say,however, that he writes only in Spanish; indeed, one is struck by the ingenious way inwhich Aninir mixes Spanish with Mapuzungun, American English and the slang of thebarrios. In expressing his urban experience thus – he writes of the ‘oscura negrura deMapulandia street’ [the dark blackness of Mapulandia street] and the ‘Mapuche en F.M.o sea Fuera del Mundo’ [Mapuche on F.M. or rather Out of this World]; he substitutesMapuche poems for ‘mapuchemas’; and declares the capital city a valid space forMapuche cultural regeneration by re-naming it the ‘mapurbe’ – he both lays claim toand subverts the dominant language.11

In Profecıa en blanco y negro (1998), a poetic journey through different scenes ofSantiago, Millahueique also plays with a mixture of languages (and communicationsystems) to illustrate the transcultural experience of Chile’s urban Mapuche population:

Esas voces que estan en los miles de angulos de la tierra me vienen del stereo, de laF.M que sintonizo, mientras el sudor arde confundiendo las imagenes, el programay los ruegos de la memoria. Mis codigos saltan de un programa a otro del WordPerfect al Lotus, del Lotus al Windous, siento los chips recalentados y las sombrasjugandoselas para ser la realidad y un pack-man comiendo los codigos de laseguridad (pp.15–16).[Those voices, of the thousands of corners of the earth, come to me from the F.M.[station] that I tune in to, while the sweat glows, confusing the images, programme

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and memory requests. My codes jump from one programme to another, fromWord Perfect to Lotus, from Lotus to Windows; I feel the re-heated chips and theshadows staking everything to be reality and a packman eating the security codes.]

Millahueique is proud of his Mapuche identity (and it emerges throughout the book) buthe is also keen to transcend the rigid definition of ‘Indian’ endorsed by the literaryestablishment and state authorities. He is part of, not separate from, an increasinglyglobalized, ‘modernised’ world and, as shown here, he actively engages with its multipleand potentially disorientating realities: the frantic pace of daily life, the plurality ofvoices trying to be heard and the frenzied exchange of information. The words emerge indisarray – they seem to tumble out, disconnected from one another; occasionally theyare misspelt – and, as readers, we try to make sense of them, like the writer tries tomake sense of the cultural transformations taking place around him.

Another important facet of the language employed by Aninir and Millahueique is itsviolent tone. In Aninir’s poetry expressions such as ‘the shit city’ and ‘the most whorishmother’ abound and in Millahueique the reader is confronted with several disturbingimages of people being tortured – of someone, for instance, ‘beating the testicles of aman who hangs in hell itself’. Such harsh language means that these poets’ attacks againstthe repressive apparatus of the state are often more direct than those of Chihuailaf andLienlaf. For example, when the latter criticises the Church in ‘Pasos sobre tu rostro’(1989), he does so with poignant images of ‘una cruz que me cortaba la/ cabeza’ [a crossthat severed my/ head] and ‘una espada que me bendecıa/ antes de mi muerte’ [a swordthat blessed me/ before I died]. Consider, in contrast, ‘Psalmo 1997’ by Aninir:

Padre nuestro que estas en el sueloputrificado, petrificado sea tu nombrevenganos de los que viven en las faldeos de la Reinay en las Condeshagase senor tu unanime voluntadası como lo hacen los fascistas en la tierray los pacos en las comisarıas.

[Our Father who art on the ground/ putrefied, petrified be thy name./Protect us from those who live in La Reina and Las Condes [upper classdistricts in Santiago]./ Thy will be done/ as it is by the fascists on earth/and the pigs in the police station.]

Here Aninir draws on a long run of re-versions of the Lord’s Prayer by renowned LatinAmerican poets, such as Ernesto Cardenal, Mario Benedetti and Nicanor Parra.The latter’s ‘Padre nuestro’ effectively turned one of the most important religiousexpressions of the Christian world inside out, depicting a suspiciously human-like Godwho suffers and makes mistakes and man who searches for the compassion to forgive him(‘Padre nuestro que esta en el cielo/ lleno de toda clases de problemas’ [Our Father whoart in heaven/ full of all manner of problems]). The dissident verses of Aninir are full ofhateful bitterness and resentment. His is not an impotent God ‘surrounded by unfaithfulAngels’ (Parra) but one that has refused to use his power to improve the lives ofeveryday men; using sarcasm, inventive rhyme and an inspired play on words, Aninir

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openly condemns the Church and its defence of Chile’s unjust social hierarchy. Lienlaf’spoem has a similarly critical message – it mourns the arrival of Christianity and evokes aChurch that was complicit with the colonial oppressors – if we choose to decipher it.With ‘Psalmo 1997’ we cannot fail to miss the point: it is pure unadulterated anger.It also focuses on the present rather than the past. Hence, Aninir being allocated(and perhaps actively taking on) the role of Hale’s more ‘conflict prone’ Indian.

The urban obscurity

As noted above, the poetry of Aninir and Millahueique is firmly rooted in their urbanreality, or, what Mapuche art historian Jose Ancan refers to as their ‘urban obscurity’(1997). The term denotes the lack of attention paid to urban Mapuche by academic andgovernmental studies (until the 1992 census made rural–urban migration impossibleto ignore), as it does their absence from the official images of multicultural Chile foundin tourist brochures, which prioritize the rural Mapuche dressed in their traditionalfinery.

In the verses of Chihuailaf and Lienlaf, references to the land and nature abound.Chihuailaf, who grew up in Quechurewe, a rural community approximately 75kilometres from Temuco, remembers his home there: ‘La casa azul en que nacı estasituada en una colina/ rodeada de hualles, un sauce, castanos, nogales/ un aromaprimaveral en invierno’ [The blue house where I was born is on a hill/ surrounded byhualles, a willow, chestnuts, walnuts/ an acacia spring-like in winter] (‘Sueno azul’,1995, translated by Bierhorst, 1998: 43). His reference to the ‘blue house’ needs to beunderstood in a metaphorical sense, for blue has positive connotations in Mapucheculture (and Chihuailaf brings it in to many of his poems): it the most importantcolour, because it represents the origins of life. The trees that surround the house arealso symbolic of life, fresh new life (the acacia is spring-like even in winter). Overall,Chihuailaf presents a rural world of comforting tranquillity. In the same poem, herecalls speaking with and listening to the trees, stones and animals:

Sentado en las rodillas de miabuela oi las primerashistorias de arbolesy piedras que dialogan entre sicon los animales y con la gente.

[Seated in my grandmother’s lap I first heard the stories/ of trees/ and stonesthat talk to animals, to humans/ and to one another. Bierhorst, 1998: 43]

Lienlaf, likewise, develops a dialogue with the land and nature in his poetry. Indeed, forthis poet it seems that language is part of nature; that it originates from nature.In ‘Palabras dichas’ (1989) we read ‘Es otro tu palabra/ me hablo el copihue/ me hablola tierra’ [Your word is another/ the copihue flower told me/ the land told me] and in‘Creacion’ (1989) Lienlaf tells us it was ‘la pampa’ who asked him to sing his poetry.Such lines suggest that the authority of Mapuche poets is derived from a close connection

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to nature and the land, which is presented in the singular (organic, homogenous), ascompared with Millahueique’s (concrete, plural) ‘miles de angulos de la tierra’ above.

In contrast to the idyllic images of the rural community, Chihuailaf and Lienlaf oftenportray their experience of urban life in a negative light. In ‘Leyenda, visiones’ (1991),Chihuailaf tries to envisage the positive energy of the countryside, particularly the rivers,but finds himself confronted by the silence and coldness of his urban surroundings:

Para que las aguas recuerden su cantogrita en el corazon la sangre gritallamando el cauce de su viejo yy caudaloso rıoNegros perros cruzan la ventanay en la ciudad soy un estero apenasque reducido y en silencio muere

[That the waters may remember their song/ the blood cries out from my heart/the riverbed cries from its ancient stream./ Black dogs pass before the window/and in the city I am barely a rivulet/ shrunken and in silence dying. Bierhorst,1998: 41]

Chihuailaf is not himself in the city. Like the rivers, he is reduced and silenced; hewithdraws from life. Lienlaf also highlights the coldness of the city in ‘Confusion’(1989):

Mi pensamiento vaga buscandome lamenteentre las paredes de edificiosiluminados y frıos.Mi boca corre tras sus palabrasque huyen y yo me quedo aquısin nada, sin comprender.

[In search of my mind my thoughts/ wander/ between the walls of cold/illuminated buildings./ My mouth runs after its words/ as they fly away, andI stand here/ with nothing, without understanding. Bierhorst, 1998: 65]

As the title of the poem makes clear, the sentiment conveyed is overwhelmingly one ofdisorientation: Lienlaf’s mind wanders, his words escape him and he is left alone,without any understanding of what is happening to him. Given the contrasting images,it comes as little surprise that Hugo Carrasco should focus on the opposition created byChihuailaf between the city and the natural world (2002: 93), or that he should pointto Lienlaf’s construction of a rural utopia – a pure pristine world – as a key element ofMapuche cultural identity (2002: 99).

However, as with their commentaries on orality and writing, one could argue thatthe critics miss the true complexity of these poets’ work here, stressing what they seeas an opposition, rather than the tensions between the city and the countryside.In various journal articles and interviews Chihuailaf has argued that it is all a question ofbalance: in the city ‘the light of an old fire has gone out, but a new fire of friendship has

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been sparked’ (1990). Some of his individual experiences of the city have beennegative, but he does not deny that many Mapuche have made it their own. Moreimportantly, the politics of the poetry is almost entirely ignored. In ‘Palabras dichas’and ‘Creacion’ Lienlaf is not merely talking of a rural idyll: he is also asserting theorganic nature of his poetry (the tierra spoke to him and thus speaks through his poetry)and using it to support Mapuche territorial claims. Additionally, one can see how someform of strategic essentialism comes into play, for the image of Mapuche people ‘atone’ with nature ties in well with that developed by the environmentalist organizationscurrently defending Mapuche community lands from large-scale development projectsin the south.

Aninir and Millahueique have no rural idyll to which they can hark back.Millahueique alludes to it through the memories of his ancestors, and Aninir, in onepoem, laments ‘sı es triste no tener tierra’. The link between land and memory is animportant aspect of contemporary Mapuche political discourse (ancestral claimssupport current claims), which is why a connection to the land invests poets likeChihuailaf and Lienlaf with authority. However, while Aninir and Millahueique engagewith such collective memories, they do not personally remember having land or havinglived in the countryside; they do not claim the rural world as theirs. Moreover, it is notpart of their present. They support Mapuche organizations in their struggles for land,but their poetry is more concerned with their and many other Mapuche people’s urbanlives. In his collection Mapurbe, Aninir focuses on the poverty and exploitation that havebecome part of the daily reality of so many Mapuche in Santiago:

Somos mapuche de hormigondebajo del asfalto duerme nuestra madre explotada por el patronnacimos en la mierdapolis por culpa del buitre cantornacimos en las panaderıas para que nos come la maldicion.

[We are Mapuche of concrete/ under the asphalt our mother sleeps,exploited by that pimp./ We were born in this shit city, because of the singingscrounger/ we were born in bakeries so that bitterness can eat away at us].

And in ‘Mari Juana la Mapunky de la Pintana’ he portrays the miserable life of aMapuche woman in one of the poorest barrios of the capital: ‘Eres la Mapuche ‘girl’ demarca no registrada/ De la esquina frıa y solitaria apegada a ‘ese’ vicio’ [You are theMapuche ‘girl’ of an unregistered brand/ Of the cold solitary corner addicted to ‘that’bad habit]. ‘That’ bad habit could be drugs (marihuana) and/or prostitution (she standsalone on a cold street corner). Mari Juana is not a ‘traditional’ Mapuche (the registeredbrand) but someone – a concoction of Mapuche (‘mari’, said twice, means hello inMapuzungun), Hispanic-Chilean (Juana) and English-American (the ‘girl’) identities –who does what she can to survive, like many other women in Santiago. Aninir therebyengages with much more than an urban version of Mapuche cultural identity, for he isexplicitly highlighting the limits of modernization and neo-liberalism in a country wherethe gap between rich and poor is rapidly expanding. So firmly rooted in the present, hispoetry is politically charged in different way from that of Chihuailaf and Lienlaf.

The same can be said of Millahueique’s writings. In Profecıa en blanco y negro he tries tocome to terms with the arbitrariness of having survived the brutal military dictatorship

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of Pinochet.12 He confronts the fragmentary, sometimes painful memories of this periodin Chilean history, as he does the limits of the ‘transition to democracy’ that followed.Millahueique makes reference to his southern Mapuche roots – ‘the eternal drizzle’, ‘theecstasy of nguillatun [a ritual ceremony]’ – but his story is also that of many non-Mapucheliving in Santiago; as he himself says, what he produces is not ‘indigenous literature’ but‘literature written by an indigenous person’ (personal interview, 6 February 2003).

What, then, do critics find in this poetry that helps them to grapple with the distinctionbetween such abstractions as ‘intra-’ and ‘intercultural’ poetic practices? Nothing – and Iargue that this is one of the reasons why they tend to exclude writers like Aninir andMillahueique from their studies. Neither fits in with an analysis constrained to questions of‘representativity’ because they have long since transcended the boundaries of ‘traditional’Mapuche culture, as leftist political activists who directly challenge the legitimacy of thestate (either from without, as does Aninir, who has been linked to the CoordinadoraArauco-Malleco, a Mapuche organization labelled ‘extremist’ by the press, or from within,as does Millahueique who works for the National Monuments Council). The ‘ethnic’ hasrefused to be kept in its place; these two poets engage with class politics and makeeconomic and social issues a key part of the debate about the ‘Mapuche question’.In contrast to Chihuailaf and Lienlaf, whose poetry commemorates a glorious military pastand, partly, lives up to people’s expectations about ‘traditional’ Mapuche culture, Aninirand Millahueique represent ethnic diversity in its most ‘dysfunctional’ (Hale, 2004) form.

Conclusion

The precarious position of Mapuche poetry within the Chilean literary canon reflectsthe situation of Mapuche people in post-dictatorship Chile. Mapuche poetry has beenaccepted, but only in the case of a few writers, and it has been relegated to its margins(categorized as ‘ethno-literature’ and studied predominantly on the basis of what it tellsus about ‘being Mapuche’). Chihuailaf and Lienlaf – writers who have ‘learnt to beboth authentic and fully conversant with the dominant milieu’ (Hale, 2004: 19) – findthat their work becomes constrained within official identity paradigms (‘Indian’ versusEuropean, tradition versus modernity, oral versus written), yet they constantlyattempt to push the boundaries of these paradigms. They have largely ‘substitutedprotest for proposal’ (ibid.), but not entirely: their verses may be distorted by the statein order to promote Chile’s multicultural modernity, but the latter cannot controlother people’s readings of their poetry, nor can it control what the writers say once ithas allowed them the space (conferences, interviews, public appearances, recitals)from which to speak. Poets such as Aninir and Millahueique are deemed too ‘conflictprone’ to be allowed to speak through the official channels. But they are not preventedfrom speaking through others (the Internet, Mapuche newspapers, literary and politicalgatherings), and they often do so alongside the ‘permitted’ Mapuche poets, testifyingto the diversity of Mapuche society and Mapuche cultural practices, and making the‘Mapuche question’ part of a highly politicized debate about the limits of Chileandemocracy. Thus, marginalized, but definitely not silent or invisible, Aninir andMillahueique, together with Chihuailaf and Lienlaf, testify to indigenous peoples’capacity to appropriate the power of writing, using it to both negotiate with andcontest the remit of the neoliberal multicultural state.

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Notes

1 The full speech can be found at http://www.gobiernodechile.cl. Unless otherwisestated, all translations are my own.

2 Lienlaf was awarded the Premio Municipal de Literatura de Santiago in 1990.Chihuailaf received the same award in 1997; he has also won the Premio del ConsejoNacional del Libro y la Lectura (1994) and the Mejores Obras Literarias de AutoresNacionales (2002). Lienlaf’s compact disc Canto y poesıa mapuche (1998) was partfunded by DIBAM (the State Department of Libraries, Archives and Museums).Numerous workshops, such as the Taller Sudamericana de Escritores de LenguasIndıgenas (1997), in which both Chihuailaf and Lienlaf participated, have beenfinanced by state entities. A major school textbook which included Mapuche poemswas Carmen Colomer Salazar et al. (2001).

3 Relevant cultural reviews and literary journals are Patrimonio Cultural (Santiago),Rocinante (Santiago), Simpson Siete (Santiago), Revista Chilena de Literatura (Santiago)and Lengua y Literatura Mapuche (Temuco). Bibliographical studies that referenceChihuailaf and Lienlaf include Domınguez (1993) and Szmulewicz (1997). Mostacademic theses and research projects on Mapuche poetry, such as Barrenechea (2002)and Moens (1999), draw heavily on the work of Hugo Carrasco (Universidad de laFrontera, Temuco) and Ivan Carrasco (Universidad Austral, Valdivia), who have eachpublished scores of articles on the subject.

4 Cited in El Diario Austral, Temuco, 23 August 1978, 3.5 I am very grateful to Jens Andermann and anonymous reviewers for their helpful

comments on an earlier version of this article.6 In one of the few pieces of Anglophone scholarship published on Mapuche poetry,

James Park noted the importance that Chihuailaf places on the words of his ancestors(2007: 24). His work helpfully draws out the diversity of indigenous writers incontemporary Chile, but in stressing the distinction between a new generation ofMapuche-Huilliche poets from the tenth region and an older generation of poets fromthe ninth region (including Chihuailaf), who are described as ‘rooted in traditionalindigenous culture and aesthetic’ (p. 38), he tends to sideline the complexities andinternal tensions of the latter’s literary production.

7 One recent exception is Garcıa Barrera’s analysis (2006) of the ‘themes of culturalresistance’ in Oratorio al senor de Pucatrihue.

8 See Aldunate and Lienlaf (2002) and Lienlaf and Mege Rosso (2000).9 Taller de Desclasificacion, organized by the Universidad de la Frontera, Temuco,

1 August 2003.10 In this instance, Lienhard is referring to indigenous religious practice and their

attitudes towards Christianity, but the point is just as relevant to indigenous peoples’use of the dominant Spanish language.

11 All quotations from Aninir’s poety (Mapurbe, ‘Psalmo 1997’ and ‘Mari Juana lamapunky de la Pintana’) are either taken from the anthology edited by Jaime Huenun(2003) or from the website http://www.meli.mapuches.org

12 Millahueique was arrested and tortured during the dictatorship, losing his right eye asa result.

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Latin American Literary Review Press.

Joanna Crow is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. She

works, and has written articles, on Chilean cultural history, Chilean nationalism and

national identity, andMapuche culture, history and politics. She is currently working on a

monograph to be titled Indian, nation and state in twentieth-century Chile: A fragmented

narrative.

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