“What in heaven’s name is the reason that the sun never sets on the empire of the dandelion?” historian Alfred Crosby wrote in the 1986 book Ecological Imperialism. “Perhaps the success of European imperialism has a biological, an ecological, component.”
In contemporary Chile, this ecological upheaval is on stark display in La Araucanía, the homeland of the Mapuche. There, plantations of Monterey pine and eucalyptus span hundreds of thousands of acres—adding up to an area more than double the size of the region’s remaining natural forest—and much of the rest of the land is overtaken by the cultivation of European crops like wheat, oats, lupines, fruits, and berries.
Imperialism, both military and ecological, took place later in La Araucanía than in many other parts of the colonial world. Finding themselves unable to conquer the area, Spanish settlers held a series of congresses delineating a border between their colony of Chile and Mapuche territory. “The uniqueness of this situation must be stressed,” writes sociologist Patricia Richards. “Unlike the indigenous in other parts of the Americas, the Mapuche … were people whose rights to independence, sovereign territory, and (albeit precarious) peace were officially recognized by the Spanish.”
In the late 1800s, however, bolstered by new military technology, the now-independent state of Chile undertook a violent, multi-decade campaign that it referred to as the “pacification” of La Araucanía. By 1883, the military had seized all but 500,000 of the community’s 10 million hectares, assigning Mapuche families to small parcels called “reductions” and auctioning the rest of the lands to settlers. That process of allotment began the region’s transformation into “the granary of Chile.” Then, in the 1970s, during the nation’s military dictatorship, new tax incentives lured timber companies to establish plantations in the country. Forestry exports increased a thousandfold over the next 40 years, at the same time that Mapuche who had relied on native forests for subsistence needs like firewood, foraging, and hunting small animals found themselves suddenly barred from those areas. In 1978, the government converted the Mapuche’s collective land titles into individual deeds, allowing their territory to be sold in parcels and fragmented. The combination of these policies pushed thousands of Mapuche out of the region.
Today, 80 percent of Chile’s Mapuche reside in urban areas, many of them in the apartment blocks and terraced housing on the periphery of Santiago. This is the terrain of Daniela Catrileo’s novel Chilco—first published in Spanish in 2023, and now available in an impressive English translation by Jacob Edelstein. It travels from the “vertical ghettos” and “wandering neighborhoods” of the capital to the fictional island of Chilco and wonders what it would mean, really, for contemporary Indigenous Chileans to return home.
Catrileo is a leader of a new generation of Chilean writers who depict and theorize Mapuche life from the perspective of the urban diaspora. Her grandfather and father came to Santiago from La Araucanía in the 1970s; like others, they faced discrimination and stopped speaking Mapudungun, the Mapuche language. Catrileo was born in 1987 and grew up in a social-housing apartment on the southern periphery of Santiago. (Her mother is not Mapuche.) Instead of “Santiaguinos,” then, Catrileo and many of her peers and characters are warriaches—urban Mapuches. The term, a portmanteau of the Mapudungun words warria (city) and che (person), became commonly used in the 1990s.
For those who identify with it, the word offers a means to insist on Mapuche identity and resist assimilation. With the rural-to-urban migration that followed the reforms of the 1970s, the displaced Mapuche came to be seen as simply part of the city’s poor. This served the state’s narrative about Chile as a multicultural polity whose denizens enjoyed undifferentiated access to rights and privileges. The idea of a raza chilena initially coalesced in the early twentieth century as a notion of race that, in Richards’s words, “built on but elided” Indigeneity. This conception of the Chilean race distanced itself from “pure” whiteness, but it also distanced itself from mestizaje, or racial mixing between European-descended settlers and Indigenous Chileans. Someone like Catrileo is champurría, a word that evokes the action of swirling a mixed drink; one columnist decries it as being “neither ‘purely’ Mapuche nor ‘purely’ Chilean.” To identify as warriache and champurría, then, is to become interlocked with Mapuche land struggles, to assert an existence that the state would prefer to overlook, and to align oneself with the Indigenous side of a history of dispossession that remains contested.
Catrileo’s work operates from within these open questions of Indigenous identity, severed connections to landscape, and the rural-urban divide from an intimate and feminist perspective. Her first book, in 2013, was a collection of poems titled Río herido, or “wounded river”—at once a translation of her Mapuche surname and a reference to the impoverished neighborhoods along two Santiago waterways where many Mapuche migrants settled. The poems capture an ambivalence to the experience of the urban Mapuche: “I have a wounded river / in the form of a canal / that shouts ‘Indian’ and throws me to the street,” reads one fragment; another proclaims, “The elements / dragged by the river / in its wounded journey / create deep fertile plains.”
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.
Mari, Chilco’s narrator, grew up with her mother and grandmother, an immigrant from Peru, in the periphery of Capital City, living in “identical towers [of] slender little apartments stacked thirty floors high” and operating a Peruvian food market. The neighborhood, she tells us, is called “La Chimba”; this means “from the other side” in the Indigenous Quechua language, and an area of the northern reaches of Santiago did historically bear that name.
Shortly after Mari has begun to explore an identity as not only Peruvian, but Quechua and therefore Indigenous, she meets Pascale, who has been hired to do construction work at the museum where she works as a secretary. Pascale is mixed-race, born to a Mapuche father from Chilco and a mainlander mother. Chilco, the book’s opening pages tell us, both means “watery” in Mapudungun and refers to the plant Fuchsia magellanica, or fuchsia, which grows on the island.
The couple live together in an upper-floor apartment in a dilapidated building in the city’s neoclassical historic center. Though they have little money, they feel solidarity with others living the same precarious existence: “We were assembling communities with the common goal of resisting real estate speculation and voracious gentrification.” Mari refers to this period as “the gentle times.”
They are queer: Mari recalls her family discovering her attraction to women, and while the novel manages to avoid using any pronoun for Pascale, it makes references to experiences of anti-queer violence and the relief of being able to “walk freely through the streets” in the city. But equally important as a genderqueer identity to Pascale is the identity of being from Chilco: “I can’t help but be shocked by the unruly landscape Pascale carries within,” Mari narrates. Elsewhere, she remarks that, though many people fled Chilco, “as they did, melancholy killed them. They never found their place.”
The gentle times come to an end when a set of housing towers collapses suddenly. In response, residents of the city descend on the site to finish the job—what Mari calls “the devastation of the devastation.” She narrates the destruction in a series of lines that float between poetry and prose:
Those days made a din like the rumble of industry. Through the joyful shouting, something like the noise of a construction site emerged, except our aim was quite the opposite.
The neighborhood smelled of sweat, of wet earth, of firewood.
We were all covered in dirt, in sawdust.
Faces stained with ash but smiling.
The residents, it seems, see the demolition as a riot against inequality. Instead of bringing justice, though, things get worse. The city begins to fill with mysterious sinkholes at the same time as the property management and utility companies abandon the capital in favor of constructing a model city in the hills above the capital called EcoMahuida—appropriating the Mapudungun word for “mountain and forest.” “Everything carried on as before, but with an even deeper inequality,” says Mari. “The fractures and holes in the earth also pierced our flesh.”
As the situation worsens, Pascale longs for Chilco. Finally, the pair decide to move to the island together. Though “there were no real jobs, and there was a lack of food and basic supplies,” the distance from the capital is a relief. “It was our most beautiful summer, far from the sinkholes, the deaths, and the soldiers,” Mari says.
Still, she feels caught between the beauty of getting to know a new place—“Each new thing I learn is a forest that grows”—and her exclusion from the community of islanders, as a mainlander. Even over dinner with Pascale’s family, “they barely look me in the eye, as if my being there were an accident.” She is also haunted by a smell of putrefaction that no one else seems to notice. Something, it seems, is not quite right—the return to the homeland is not as idyllic as planned.
In the final chapter, in the course of an eight-page section titled “Afternoon,” Mari goes out on a walk to sketch plants and gets caught in a storm. She takes shelter in a house where only a teenager is present. As the teenager attempts to situate Mari, he refers to Pascale as “that weird girl.” Mari becomes uncomfortable and leaves. On her way home, she hears a gunshot—and from there the novel jumps quickly to a violent conclusion.
Without spoiling the ending, I think it’s important to note the abrupt movement of the novel’s close. On first read, it feels like a weak attempt at denouement after so much slow, sensory observation. Even the mysterious rankness that pursues Mari seemed to foreshadow something much subtler. Yet in the dissonance between the characters’ story of love and perseverance and the sudden annihilation of their future, the novel’s purpose is recast. Instead of a story of “making do” even under the most adverse of circumstances, Chilco becomes a novel about the impossibility of return on an existential level.
I came to terms with Chilco’s ending by thinking about it in light of the work of another queer and Indigenous writer, one from the boreal extreme of the Western Hemisphere: Cree poet and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt. One of the central debates in queer theory is the question of how to relate to the future. Literary critic Lee Edelman argued controversially in 2004’s No Future that queer people should embrace the figure of the “Scrooge,” turning their backs on society’s orientation toward children, reproduction, and the very notion of “the future.” Five years later, cultural studies theorist José Esteban Muñoz wrote, in response, that queerness itself was a future-oriented concept—a utopian future now visible only in glimpses on the horizon.
Belcourt’s work intervenes to add that, for Indigenous queers, the debate is all but moot: The future was taken away long ago. And yet there is nowhere else to go besides the grief-filled present. He writes: “Maybe / reserve is / another word / for morgue / is another word / for body bags /—call it home anyways.” For Mari and Pascale, home is also a place where death is close at hand.
On the penultimate page of Chilco, “on the horizon of the sea, the impossible appears.” When all hope has been lost, the villagers of Chilco gather in ceremony on the beach to honor three massive whales that have come into view. “They’re immense, swimming in circles, unafraid of extinction,” remarks Mari. Mulling the creatures’ miracle of defying death seems to revive her faith that there is hope for humans, too.
If the imposition of new ecologies was integral to the European colonization of the Americas, any process of resistance and decolonization must be ecological, too. It’s in poetry and fiction that the imagination for such a thing could take root—and Catrileo understands this well. Chilco’s imagistic and documentary structure, its radical mixture of poetry and fiction, is held together by the novel’s emphasis on the ecology of the island—the presence of the ocean, the fuchsia plant from which Chilco derives its name, Mari’s pleasure at settling into a place through understanding its flora.
At the same time, it is a novel on which contemporary Indigenous realities weigh heavy. In their own ways, both Mari and Pascale live with “the brokenness-of-being that is Indigeneity,” in Belcourt’s words again, and with the questions of belonging that being mixed-race foments. A happy ending, Catrileo seems to tell us as she pulls out the rug from under their hard-won domestic bliss, was made impossible long ago. For her and her characters, it’s not the future that flashes tantalizingly on the horizon, but the possibility of truly going home.