The appearance of corpses in rubbish tips is not a recent phenomenon. In Argentina, tips have served not only as sites for the disposal of bodies but also as murder scenes. Many of these other bodies found in such places belong to individuals who have suffered violent deaths, which go on to become public issues, or else are ‘politicised deaths’. Focusing on two cases that have received differing degrees of social, political and media attention – Diego Duarte, a 15-year-old boy from a poor background who went waste-picking on an open dump and never came back, and Ángeles Rawson, a girl of 16 murdered in the middle-class neighbourhood of Colegiales, whose body was found in the same tip – this article deals with the social meanings of bodies that appear in landfills. In each case, there followed a series of events that placed a certain construction on the death – and, more importantly, the life – of the victim. Corpses, once recognised, become people, and through this process they are given new life. It is my contention that bodies in rubbish tips express – and configure – not only the limits of the social but also, in some cases, the limits of the human itself.
just a few kilometres but completely disconnected, having in common only the hundreds and thousands of workers who cross the entire region to carry out their daily tasks for the care and comfort of Santiago’s upper classes. In Chile, just like in other contexts in Latin America, there is a specific taxonomy to name these high-income sectors of society: they are called cuicos . Of course, the cuicos are not only recognizable by their accumulated capital. They behave in a certain way and have an identifiable
Waria che’ installation: they unveiled another history, challenging with other materialities – smaller or simpler ones, belonging to everyday common objects – the monumentality of the square. The scene of Santiago Waria later set in the square, featuring a dialogue between a Mapuche guide giving decolonial tours of the site and an upper-class passerby questioning his account, is built on these objects and the (in)visible stories they entail, the struggles for memory, and the possibility of an
The places of memory, those spaces where collective memory is crystallised and sheltered, are ephemeral and volatile for the diaspora. What is a place of memory for those who had to undertake migration to survive? The train station at their destination? The bars frequented by the community in those cities that sheltered them? The marginal areas inhabited by them? The hyper-exploitative workspaces where they had to sell their labour as the people at the bottom of the chain of production? This chapter explores the (im)possibility of memory in a space where the very presence of Mapuche has been invisibilised, if not denied: the upper-class neighbourhoods of Santiago de Chile. The ‘Barrio Oriente’ was (and still is) a place where Mapuche women migrating from the south of the country were employed as nannies, housemaids and domestic workers. Their labour facilitated the reproduction of the life of our elites, yet their stories are simply vanishing from these privileged areas. Elaborating on these trajectories, the chapter addresses a performative intervention taken forward during the MapsUrbe project, seeking precisely to highlight and defy this invisibility and resulting in a minimum commemoration of denied biographical transits.
were responsible for shaping the public education project that the Chilean state pursued from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Both male and female preceptors would repeat in the emerging Chilean schools – including those in Mapuche territory – a uniform account of history, a Universalist model of customs and institutions, a strict separation of roles according to gender and class, and finally, the obliteration of any cultural difference. Amid this eagerness for norms and normality
from the upper-class neighbourhood of Lo Barnachea to the peripheral municipality of Cerro Navia. In both areas, Mapuche names can be found: in the former, generally in luxurious gated communities named with Mapuche words in a folkloristic and appropriative gesture; in Cerro Navia, in poblaciones and neighbourhoods where many of the residents are Mapuche. Cerro Navia is also where the poet David Aniñir Guiltraro – whose verses inspired this project in the first place – was born, raised, and still
. Over time, it became a space for popular socialising. Perhaps it was because of the small artificial lake or the multiple museums in the area, or simply the historical proximity to the lower- and middle-class sectors, but within a century, the park in Quinta Normal went from being a space for scientific progress to becoming a park for the leisure of the urban masses. ‘Barbarism’ had invaded the Paris of America. From the 1950s, Mapuche migrants arriving from the south of the country began to
subsequent years. The short film, shot early in 1971 and with a voiceover by anthropologist Annabella Rossi, generated a polemic with the local clergy for its reading of the pilgrimage. Talking over the images and the post-synced music, Rossi’s text describes the practices of the pilgrims as an effect of the misery of their living conditions. They are described as marginals cut off from modernity, with its circulation of knowledge, goods and services, excluded by logics of class exploitation. The voiceover builds up a sense of distance, explicitly opposing ‘us’, bourgeoise
indigenous territories (Ugarte, Fontana, Caulkins 2019 ). Neoliberalism, as first applied by the civil–military dictatorship, was in continuity with a ‘class project’ carried out by the old agrarian oligarchy, briefly sidestepped by the Allende government (Harvey 2005). These spatial tensions and temporal layers, somehow interrogated by the Mapocho silently flowing through the city, are especially strong in its central sectors and in the boundaries between those areas and the periphery. While this is elaborated on
in science for progress and civilisation, looking towards the social and material advances of Europe as examples of evolution and modernity. The indigenous and poorer sectors of society represented a drag on the moral and material development of Chile to such an illustrious liberal: these sectors incubated most of the evils that impeded the march towards a civilised society. Mimicking Parisian urbanism and pushing the lower-class and indigenous occupations of urban spaces towards the margins, Vicuña