Can Indigenous Chileans Ever Return to their Land?
The stories in 2019’s Piñen, Catrileo’s first book of prose, take place in the same landscape of the Santiago periphery (FSG Originals will publish Edelstein’s translation of Piñen next spring). “Everyone who came ended up living in the shantytowns along the Zanjón de la Aguada, near the Franklin barrio,” Catrileo narrates in the story “Have You Seen How the Weeds Sprout From the Dry Ground?” (the title is a playful echo of a line by Mexican poet Jaime Sabines). Both books insist on the city as an Indigenous space at the same time as they emphasize the marginality of warriaches relative both to other urban Chileans and to their own Indigenous communities.
Catrileo’s poetry chapbooks El territorio del viaje (The Territory of the Journey, 2017) and Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas (The Waters Stopped Joining Other Waters, 2020) each relate a journey to La Araucanía. In both, return is ambivalent and incomplete. While it pleases the narrator to be in a place where “we are the majority,” her arrival is complicated by the reality on the ground: The region has been militarized by the Chilean state due to Mapuche land struggles, and her own feeling of belonging in the rural landscape is at once deep and partial. “A woman appears / I ask her for a beer. / ‘You’re not from here,’ she says. / How are you supposed to respond to that?”
Chilco, perhaps, is the response—a synthesis of the themes of home, identity, and displacement present in Catrileo’s previous works. The novel takes place in a fictionalized Chile marked by the same wounds of colonialism, dictatorship, and neoliberal economic doctrine as that of the real world. It follows two characters, Marina Quispe Quispe, or Mari, and her partner, Pascale Antilaf, as they migrate from Capital City to Chilco, where Pascale grew up. The book is poetic and documentary, with a plot that develops through imagistic prose and a form structured around a “Chilco Archive,” which introduces readers to the history, geography, early chroniclers, and illustrations of the invented island.
