CHILE

The Mapuche are the largest indigenous group in southern Chile in the Araucanía Region. Before Chile had its own nation, the Spanish, to a certain extent, allowed the Mapuche to exist without conflict. Starting in 1845, Europeans were targeted by the Chilean government to immigrate to the new nation. Many of the Europeans targeted at this time later moved into the Araucanía Region because the government was selling land [there]. By taking over the land and selling it to European immigrants, over time, the Mapuche people have lost claims to their land. Even though the government recognizes the Mapuche, it participates in symbolic violence toward the indigenous group. Symbolic violence is how power inequalities are sustained, not only through physical violence but also through social norms and practices. While the Mapuche talk about generational trauma from their displacement, the Europeans on their land insist on peaceful coexistence and the legal obtaining of land. Just as with Puerto Rico and the Taíno, Chile has legally and culturally erased Mapuche heritage.

—JakeWinston

As a consequence of the Chilean government taking over Mapuche territory, societal views toward this indigenous group shifted significantly. All of the power was put into the hands of the Chilean government, and this monopolized how the historical memory of the Mapuche is presented and remembered … The Mapuche memory has been silenced as a result of institutional forces dominating their narrative.

—Hannah Shiffert

The Mapuche story does not go “extinct” with the arrival of the Spanish, like in Puerto Rico. Instead, promoted by generally respected treaties and coexistence, the Mapuche people maintained a strong society and formed “part of the great national brotherhood” in Chile. This relative peace did not last forever, and in the 1850s with a drive to acquire land for agriculture, the symbolic attack on the indigenous people gained momentum.

The state and media began referring to them as barbarians, and their land was slowly encroached on by the white elites. With a substantial amount of power held in such a dominant group, paired with a hunger for capitalistic gain, the government wanted to maintain its dominance over time, and the promotion and archival of the events within tragedies like Mapuche could have risked the survival of the new nation-state that was formed.

As a result, the Mapuche were pushed out of the national narrative in Chile and into the background where they were seen as peasants with much less land than they had previously thrived on.

—Evan Clark

In addition to the contested memories of the Mapuche people attempting to rewrite the dominant historical narrative propagated by the Chilean state, Elizabeth Jelin, a social scientist who researches human rights and inequalities, introduces the concept that memory itself is gendered and conforms to the existing gender norms within society. Jelin claims that “in acts of direct repression, power is also exercised in the framework of gender relations.” Jelin analyzes the split in gendered memories, writing that “the dominant gender another man, but rather … the aspect of the feminine.

—BlakeRamsey

During the 1950s Chile was, like many countries post-war, experiencing the dramatic impacts of material growth and industrialization. However, these changes were not only physical. Music, too, became commodified. Its deadening resulted in an overly simple message that was of little worthwhile substance; it system identifies masculinity with domination and aggression, and these characteristics are heightened in military identity. Femininity is conceived as an ambivalent condition combining the spiritual superiority of women … with submissiveness and passivity in the face of desires and orders of men.” Gender is utilized by power structure to make memories adhere to the preferred dominant structure in a subconscious manner, creating a superstructure of gender dynamics within society. An example of this engenderment of memory comes from the practice of torture under the Pinochet regime. Torture became a Hegelian absolute for gender dynamics within Chile, with the torturer subsuming masculinity by showing their aggression against a covered subversive, fully enacting their will not against reflected the evolution of society from the seemingly backward ways of the rural past to the era of the modern. In the early 1960s to her death in 1967, Violeta Parra dramatically challenged the historical memory of rural folk music within Chilean culture. [Chilean music Professor] Rodrigo Torres Alvarado notes this development resulted from “the (concentrated) effort of the state and the culture industry to “modernize” so called folklore, converting it into the foundation of a symbolic universe representative of the entire nation.”

Parra changed this historical narrative from a collective agricultural past that had been molded to fit the commercial demands of the music industry back to the truly representative roots. Her song “Above, the Sun is Burning,” which was released in 1961, utilized a striking drum-like melody to emphasize the desperation of the working classes in the rural areas while urbanization raged. She uses the repetition of “while above the sun kept burning” to show the constancy of the poverty and inability to get ahead in rural areas. One stanza of the song remarks that the “pampas are a dry zone, a sign states nevertheless the bottles of liquor come and go.” The metaphorical use of the wet liquor and dry pampas as opposites allows the folk character of the song to shine through in a powerful way that points to the realities of rural life. Parra used this unique identification with the true folklore to look inward and backward into the past to influence her musical progress forward, which challenged the current narrative. The growth of this New Song genre that she pioneered was characteristic of a renaissance period, as it brought a rebirth of meaningful folk music that directly challenged the collectivization of the past. Parra used her musical and storytelling abilities to effectively resist the degradation of folk culture by the large-looming power of Western influence and the aggressive growth of capitalism within Chilean society.

—Patrick France

Violeta Parra sings in her song, “Arauco Tiene una Pena,” “Rise up! Huenchullán ... Rise up! Curimon ... Rise up! Callupan.” These lyrics serve as a call to all those of Mapuche descent in Chile for resiliency and to rise up in the face of oppression. The names Parra includes in her lyrics are the names of famous Mapuche warriors of the past who fought against the conquistadors. Parra is participating in the battle for memory by mentioning these figures in her song. Those of Mapuche descent in Chile should look to the Mapuche warriors of the past for inspiration in resilience because they are, as their ancestors, the best beacons of resilience in Mapuche culture. Much of the content of Parra’s lyrics focuses on the oppression of the Spanish on the Mapuche in the past.

—Sam

Wise

Parra reimagined and recontextualized traditional music and art and used it in such a way that created a form of opposition to the popular trends of modernization. In doing so, the artist was able to force the collective memory of rural Chileans into the public sphere, which in turn created an alternative to the public memory being exercised by powerful social forces. The reintroduction of memory into the arena of struggle reversed, in a sense, some of the silences used by society to hinder the cultural expressions of the rural poor.

—Caleb Franklin

[Chilean Music Professor] Rodrigo Torres

Alvarado paints the rise of Violeta Parra as that of the soul of the counter-memory of the Mapuche. In the song titled “Yo Canto a la Diferencia,” Parra’s rhythm creates a world of ease and peace, but her lyrics tell the story of the European conquest from the perspective of the Mapuche. A sense of true terror is felt as the “aliens” from another planet create the “profane” and “painful” “open-air concert” of indigenous bloodshed.

Alvarado says it best when describing how Parra “powerfully crystallized in the imaginary of Chilean society … previously been deemed worthless or irrelevant.” The pairing of gracious melodies with brutally scripted lyrics allows Parra to tell stories that had been lost for decades or even centuries.

Music has the inherent power to change a narrative of an entire group of people and shed light on the stories pushed into the background of the greater picture.

—Evan Clark