Emergent Conversation 27
This discussion and translation are part of the series Indigenous Politics, State Relations, and Populism in the Americas
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 27
By Nikola García Johnson
Figure 1 Digital photograph of the interior of a Mapuche ruka in Santiago. From a Facebook post by Ruka en Macul Choyituyiñ Warria Meu, dated August 28, 2019.
Post archived with the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/screenshot-2026-02-25-at-4.03.34-pm
Original Post:
https://www.facebook.com/rukaenmacul/posts/pfbid0FhLjhGhhzcrdpK25JQs2KRHytnL95dPH4oe51Bm8eb8N3qcYYHC1F44iFPsh6XULl#?kjj
Introduction: Populism in an Indigenous Engagement Townhall
On a Friday evening in October 2019, roughly 50 Mapuche, Aymara, and Chilean neighbors gathered for the Macul municipality’s Indigenous engagement townhall (trawün) in the ruka, a Mapuche thatched-roof structure that functions as the neighborhood’s Indigenous cultural center. This trawün was part of the citizen consultation process for the legally mandated six-year community development plan (PLADECO), which, like most municipalities in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, Macul had outsourced to a private consulting firm. [1] Two facilitators read from scripts on their iPads as part of a structured focus group that asked participants the following questions:
- What are the greatest issues for the Indigenous Peoples living in the comuna (municipality)?
- What are the main problems of the comuna?
- What are the main problems that need to be addressed for Macul to be the city of our dreams? (Fieldnotes, October 16, 2019)
Rather than offer policy suggestions, participants used the townhall as an opportunity to criticize the consultation process itself, insisting that the municipal government acknowledge and act upon Indigenous citizens’ contributions to the city’s urban development and public education. Cristina, an Indigenous educator and former militant of the Mapuche organization Ad-Mapu, criticized the framework of Indigenous-state relations by linking this townhall to the student led evasion masiva (mass fare evasion), a protest unfolding just outside the ruka: [2]
We know that you are here asking us the same questions again because whenever we complain or whenever there’s a protest y deja la caga’ (cause a ruckus), the city claims that they don’t understand what we want and immediately calls for assemblies like this. But we have been coming to meetings like this for years telling them exactly what we want, and our problem is that the city doesn’t do it! (Fieldnotes, October 16, 2019)
Cristina’s critique voiced the representational tension at the heart of populist discourse as Indigenous community members of the cultural center practice it. This paradox is acutely visible in contemporary Indigenous–state relations in Latin America, where multicultural and populist reforms have created participatory mechanisms in state governance. In many contexts and countries, consultative processes are often criticized as merely symbolic or cosmetic reforms in many countries and contexts. For Indigenous peoples, these consultative frameworks are not only superficial, but frequently further reduce Indigenous communities’ capacity to refuse developmental plans or to govern themselves otherwise (Dest 2025; Hale & Millamán 2006; Postero 2007). The pretense of consultation embodies what Povinelli (2002) terms the “cunning of recognition.” This concept describes how multicultural inclusion operates as a technology of governance that regulates Indigenous alterity through recognition itself: the more successfully Indigenous peoples perform the state’s vision of authenticity, the more tightly recognition bounds the field of intelligibility within which their claims can appear.
Cristina’s comments mirrored the conventions of populist rhetoric by establishing a clear “us/them” divide, aligning Indigenous citizens and protesting high school students against the municipal authorities. Yet the “us” she evokes is not rooted in nationalist or strategic essentialism, but in the intersubjective relations formed among Mapuche, Aymara, and Chilean neighbors over decades. Cristina’s exit from political organizations and her presence at the trawün signals an insistence that participatory spaces like the Indigenous cultural center are a living image of democracy. Rather than appealing to electoral or street-based forms of populist aesthetics, Cristina reframes the cultural center itself as a space where democracy is enacted through quiet, non-sovereign practices of decolonial pedagogy and everyday democratic life. [3]
Cristina is acutely aware that the trawün in Macul exemplifies its own “cunning of recognition.” Indigenous residents are consulted on communal development, but only as symbols of difference rather than as agents of change. She links her intervention within the affective atmosphere of the Estallido Social, evoking the “we” of el pueblo (the people) not as a symbolic category or sovereign authority, but as an embodied and lived experience. These are not the only tensions that populist governance in Chile poses for Indigenous people in Chile. Scholars have asked whether populism deforms liberal democracy or rather reveals its contradictions (Arditi 2003; Moffitt 2015; Ranciere 2010). For Urbinati (2019), populism erodes plural representation through treating “the people” as a unified entity that legitimizes decisions while erasing dissent (88–91). Others have argued that by dissolving distinctions between ordinary and constitutional politics, populism expands spaces of deliberation and opinion while simultaneously restricting public participation in decision-making processes.
Otherwise Democracy
This essay explores how Indigenous movements in Chile appropriate hegemonic populist discourses and governmental processes while drawing from both Indigenous political practices and the historical Poblador movement—an urban populist formation built by Indigenous and Chilean activists in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on an Indigenous cultural center on the periphery of the Santiago Metropolitan Region. Like Cristina, educators and associates of the center sometimes mirror populist discourse, sometimes appropriate it, sometimes reject it; their engagements with state populism transforms its staged spectacles of consultation through a practice that I term “otherwise democracy.”
The cultural center was established in 2012 by Mapuche, Aymara, Rapa Nui, and Chilean neighbors who had collaborated through Indigenous associations long before the Chilean government recognized Indigenous Peoples under the 1992 Indigenous Law. This organizing created democratic openings during the final years of the Pinochet Dictatorship (1973–1990), through campaigns associated with the 500 Years of Resistance Commission that protested the government’s Columbus Quincentennial celebrations. Across the Chilean capital, over a dozen Indigenous cultural centers now host educational events, including elementary school fieldtrips, artisanal fairs, public presentations, and environmentalist workshops. These centers also host trawün, or townhalls, and workshops with labor and environmental groups. Traditional healers from rural Indigenous territories visit centers regularly to attend patients and officiate events and festivals, such as Indigenous New Year Celebrations, the Mapuche We Tripantü and Aymaran Machaq Mara (both ceremonial events marking the winter solstice). While many centers engage in similar collaborations, the trawün I described above also became a venue for international dialogues during my fieldwork, hosting visiting Indigenous delegates, foreign diplomats, and study abroad students.
This cultural center here operated as a site of experiential learning in what I call an “otherwise democracy” (Democracia Porvenida): a collective political horizon enacted through lived, aspirational practice, which is immanent and oppositional even within dominant systems/hegemonies. Although Spanish lacks a fully equivalent term for “the otherwise,” I use the neologism porvenida to signal a democratic possibility enacted in the present, rather than the futurity implied by the word porvenir (“to come”). The term also differentiates the concept from Derrida’s (1994) “démocratie à venir,” which frames democracy as perpetually deferred. In contrast, my theorization of an otherwise democracy names an immanent, lived horizon sustained through everyday practice. [4]
Rather than a future regime or democracy of a different kind, otherwise democracy points to the ethical praxis and affective relations through which people sustain democratic possibility within and against democracy’s own limits. This immanent democratic practice is what feminist, decolonial, and postcolonial theorists have described as the labor of living and imagining otherwise (Escobar 2018; Mbembe 2018; Povinelli 2016; Zibechi 2024). At the cultural center, otherwise democracy takes shape through the daily labor of managing space, a process grounded in the intertwined, Indigenous politics of convivencia (conviviality) and autogestión (collaborative self-help).
I present two case studies to illustrate how Indigenous cultural centers in Santiago materialize both the populism of the historic Poblador movement (a poor people’s movement)—a twentieth-century struggle for housing, urban citizenship, and territorial claim-making—and the Indigenous traditions of territorial defense and educational praxis. In doing so, cultural center associates draw from emplaced, historically grounded populist practices as well as from Indigenous political practices to practice otherwise democracy.
The first case examines the construction of the Aymara uta (a quincha-style adobe structure) to explore how infrastructure becomes a site where political and social imaginaries are materially built through autogestión and infrastructural populism.[5] The second focuses on a televised gardening workshop to examine how the everyday work of environmental pedagogy renders visible the aspirational dimensions of convivencia. Together, these examples show how urban residents mobilize convivencia and autogestión to sustain democratic possibility within and beyond the limits of populist institutional inclusion, transforming the unfulfilled promises of participation into an everyday, relational practice that keeps democracy open and unfinished.
Together, these examples show how urban residents mobilize convivencia and autogestión to sustain democratic possibility within and beyond the limits of populist institutional inclusion, transforming the unfulfilled promises of participation into an everyday, relational practice that keeps the field of democratic intelligibility open rather than bounded.
Politics of Convivality and Collaborative “Self-Help”
At the cultural center, the politics of convivencia and autogestión are embedded in everyday negotiations over space, representation, and history. In political geography and urban ecology, conviviality often refers to “the ways in which the everyday lives of ordinary people, living in diverse places, learn to live with difference … by cultivating a (reflexive and/or habituated) understanding that identities are contingent, fluid, and dynamic” (Samanani 2023, 2112). Practices of living together unfold within landscapes shaped by enduring racial hierarchies, inequalities, and colonial power relations. Consequently, conviviality names the persistence of inequality and the possibility of its transformation. Conviviality refers to a relational ethics oriented toward multiplicity and becoming rather than static, harmonious coexistence (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2020; Mbembe 2018; Segura 2020).
The politics of autogestión draw on a longer genealogy that connects the Indigenous cultural center’s practices to broader currents in urban, postcolonial, and decolonial thought. Henri Lefebvre (1974) theorized autogestion as “self-help,” and “self-management” (also, Lefebvre 2009, 150; Stone 2024). Though this French concept translates readily into Spanish, it does not map neatly onto English. “Self-help” carries connotations of individuated and autonomous subjectivity which distort autogestión’s collaborative and interdependent dimensions (Gago 2017; Harvey 2005; Vieta 2018). [6] Here, autogestión is better conceptualized as a form of lived democracy. The associates of the Indigenous center invoke both convivencia and autogestión in diverse settings, from scheduling events and coordinating with neighborhood organizations to managing finances, maintaining shared spaces and addressing conflicts that arise in public gatherings. Convivencia and autogestión are lived as practices of tension, critique, and disagreement central to political engagement (Postero & Elinoff 2019).
Section of the mural “Mujer: Fuerza Particular” by muralist group Colectiva Las OTRAS. The inscription reads: “Janequeo (1580), wife of Chief Huepotaén, tortured and killed by order of Governor Alonso de Sotomayor. She avenged him and liberated her people, who named her chief at age 20.” Photographer: Nikola Garcia Johnson July 2, 2021.
Populism, the Poblador Movement, and Indigenous People in Chile
The neighborhoods surrounding the cultural center were shaped by the Poblador Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when Mapuche migrants and non-Indigenous peasants joined Santiago’s working poor to establish new communities through organized land occupations and grassroots urbanization (Murphy 2015; Perez 2022). These struggles fused material survival with the populist imaginaries of the Global Sixties, linking the right to housing with broader claims to political participation. [7] Under Salvador Allende (1970–1973), the state recognized neighborhood-level decision-making and cultural initiatives associated with Nueva Canción, muralism, peñas, and other forms of grassroots artistic production that linked political mobilization with popular education [8]. Following the 1973 military coup, the Pinochet government dismantled these participatory structures and targeted poblador settlements as centers of resistance (Bruey 2018; Schlotterbeck 2018). [9] The Pinochet regime advanced an exclusionary populism rooted in nationalism and anti-communism and excluded Indigenous peoples from public representation (Mallon 2006; Richards 2013).
By the 1980s, Mapuche university activists linked rural and urban struggles through cultural caravans and educational workshops, laying the groundwork for the Indigenous cultural centers that emerged (Antileo Baeza & Alvarado Lincopi 2017). Following the 1992 Indigenous Law, the Chilean government created the Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (CONADI, National Corporation for Indigenous Development) to fund projects aligned with poverty alleviation and market integration (Millaman & Lana 2022). While these policies enabled some gains, they subordinated Indigenous visibility to market logics and extractive development (Nahuelpán et al. 2022). During this period, Indigenous cultural centers emerged as sites of urban visibility and intercultural pedagogy, and as sites where Mapuche and non-Indigenous residents collaborated to sustain forms of popular education and territorial politics, combining the populism of the urban Poblador movement and Indigenous oppositional politics. The Indigenous cultural center where I conducted field research crystallizes these overlapping legacies of Poblador popular democracy and Indigenous territorial defense, both of which are grounded in collective labor, pedagogy, and the struggle to inhabit the city.
Case 1: The Infrastructural Populism of Autogestión in the Aymaran Uta
Figure 3: Three women building a Uta in an Indigenous cultural center in Macul” Photographer: Nikola Garcia Johnson July 15th, 2018.
In 2018, community members began constructing an Aymara uta next to a Mapuche ruka. As dozens of volunteers mixed clay and layered adobe walls by hand, some expressed pride in the “thousand hands [that] built the walls of the uta” (Garcia 2020). The project was designed as a form of intercultural education, through which participants adapted Indigenous building practices to improve their neighborhoods. Guided by a group of Mapuche students completing a master’s thesis on sustainable Indigenous architecture, volunteers learned quincha-style adobe construction through a community program called “build days.” This traditional method combines a wooden frame with woven infill packed with grasses and tree limbs, as well as recycled materials, like chain-link fencing filled with “ecobricks” (plastic bottles stuffed with grocery bags and other disposable packaging). Once packed, the walls were coated with layers of adobe gathered from a nearby canal. Because quincha walls are flexible, they can bend and absorb movement during earthquakes without collapsing—an important adaptation in Chile’s seismically active environment. And while adobe is not waterproof and will eventually crack after seismic events, it can be repaired by reapplying the same clay mixture.
Educators framed future maintenance as a lesson in collaborative responsibility. Emphasizing the building’s endurance reinforced its dual role as an architectural and pedagogical project. Organizers publicized the project on social media to obtain donations from other community groups. With the help of a community garden association, a university books-for-prisoners program, and a community radio station, they received hundreds of donated “ecobricks.” For the educators, the building itself came to symbolize the center’s ethic of collaboration and autogestión.
The construction of the quincha-style adobe structure also functioned as a form of decolonial pedagogy that drew on the histories of the Poblador movement and Indigenous territorial defense. On a Sunday afternoon in 2018, Miguel, a Mapuche educator in his mid 60s, gave me a walking tour of their center and surrounding neighborhood.[10] Gesturing toward the new high-rises along the expanded metro line a mile west of the center, Miguel explained how the association participates in community decision-making around land use and shared resources:
Over the years, the mayors of Macul have wanted to expropriate the poblaciones, building condominiums like those guetos verticales… The mayors of Peñelolén wanted to expropriate Lo Hermida and destroy the emblematic neighborhoods of the poblaciones, and the people said no! Peñalolén won their struggle but we’re still in this struggle here in Macul (Interview, August 12, 2018). [11]
The “guetos verticales” (vertical ghettos) that Miguel pointed out refer to high-rise apartment buildings that, today, primarily house low-income, Afro-descendant/Black immigrants from other Latin American countries. The phrase circulates in public discourse as a critique of urban overcrowding and inequality, even as it reproduces derogatory classed and racialized connotations.
Figure 4: an example of a high-rise development adjacent to an agricultural canal location: Macul, Chile. photographer: Nikola Garcia Johnson July 21th, 2021.Miguel’s critique of urban planning in the comuna exemplifies what Beveridge, Naumann, and Rudolph (2024) call “infrastructural populism.” This term refers to the contradictory invocation of “the right to the city,” or the collective right of inhabitants to shape and transform urban space according to their needs. Such claims often exclude racialized minorities and immigrants, sometimes undermining working-class solidarities they profess to defend (Holston 2008, 2019). In contrast to the conventional populism of the right to the city, educators at the Indigenous cultural center grounded their infrastructural pursuits in a community-based, decolonial ethos emphasizing collaboration and mutual responsibility.
In this sense, the Indigenous educators’ politics of building subverted the exclusionary logics of right-wing infrastructural populism. As Renaldo, an Aymaran educator in his mid 50s, explained to me, “although it takes longer than relying on government grants or private loans, if we cooperate to build our infrastructure together, no one single person can say how it should be run because it is a part of all of us.” Renaldo followed this by describing his own vision of infrastructural populism:
The station was built here to bring the metro into the neighborhood, but no one had any role in building it. Everyone sees it as something ajeno (foreign), it’s not a part of the people… these city officials don’t understand how the metro controls our lives, but we don’t control the metro. We didn’t decide how it was built, its hours of operation, or its fare… (Interview, January 13, 2020).
Renaldo’s statement highlights the value that community members place on the politics of autogestion. Neighborhood cleanups, ecobrick production, and intercultural knowledge exchange are practices through which residents claim not only physical space but also decision-making power over space. Such practices contest state initiatives that claim to represent popular interests, while excluding local participation or inclusion from infrastructural projects. Renaldo’s account suggests that the “right to the city,” while constrained by state-controlled infrastructural provision and the politics of recognition, is sustained through collaborative, everyday labor that expands the field within which neighbors can claim and shape urban space as a democratic practice. Residents regard the adobe structure as a shared achievement rooted in solidarity and pedagogy. In this sense, infrastructure becomes not merely a tool of governance but a site where political imagination is materially constructed (Anand et al. 2018; Kristin Skrabut 2021; Larkin 2013).
Case Study 2: Televising Convivencia: Public pedagogy and Indigenous-state relations during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Amid COVID-19 lockdowns in April 2021, the Indigenous cultural center hosted a workshop on urban gardening that was filmed and broadcast on municipal TV and social media as part of a government-sponsored program. The workshop offered instruction on composting, vertical gardening, and seed propagation, with the aim of deepening “sensitivization and environmental education” (Fieldnotes, April 10, 2021). A key component of the planned curriculum was vermiculture.
Associates of the Indigenous center agreed to film this municipally sponsored activity at the center only after state officials promised the government would purchase and distribute 200 vermiculture kits to participating households. The municipality aimed to sponsor an educational event in spite of COVID-19 lockdowns that had suspended most forms of community participation. The compost produced by participating households would then serve as fertilizer for a terraced garden at the cultural center. In preparation for filming, the educators organized a series of “build days” to construct the terraced garden bed to receive the promised compost.
The municipaliy intended to stage a scripted portrayal of civic collaboration. Educators at the cultural center were engaged in the slower, everyday work of environmental sensitivization. Rapid urbanization in the Santiago valley basin had degraded the previously fertile soil as latifundistas (large-scale landowners) excavated clay for brickworks. During the first construction day, Miguel explained that, “This whole neighborhood was established in a toma (encampment) along the agricultural canal, and that is what we did here. After the 2010 earthquake, this [part of the] neighborhood became the site where the municipality dumped all the rubble from the destroyed buildings” (Fieldnotes, March 27, 2021). For educators like Miguel, establishing the garden was not only about cultivating plants but also about restoring the soil and reconnecting people with the origins of their food, a kind of knowledge that had been erased from urban space.
Figure 5. Terraced garden at the Indigenous cultural center awaiting delivery of compost for a municipally sponsored workshop. The retaining wall was built from 2010-earthquake rubble dumped at the site before it became the center. Photo by Nikola Garcia Johnson, March 2021.
Figure 6 Promotional social media advertisement from the Macul municipal government for the “1ª Red Comunal de Huertos Comunitarios y Jardines Verticales” (First Communal Network of Community Gardens and Vertical Gardens). Santiago, September 22, 2022. The campaign’s language of food sovereignty and healthy neighborhoods contrasts with the limited material support provided for the televised workshop described above. Facebook post by Huertas comunitarias y jardines de Macul. Post archived with the Internet Archive at:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=162060233159340&set=a.162060223159341
Original Post: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=162060233159340
When the municipal TV crew began preparations for filming, educators learned that the municipal government had not actually purchased and distributed the vermiculture kits. Without notice, the composting program had been cancelled due to lack of resources, and no household compost was delivered. To proceed with the planned shoot, municipal staff bought bags of soil. The video became a staged spectacle of a completed community garden nourished by neighbors’ compost that was never produced. The shoot created a fictionalized representation of collaborative sustainability that masked the discontinuities, improvisations, and dishonesties underlying its creation.
Two years earlier, during the PLADECO trawün, residents had voiced hopes for municipal recognition and collaboration. The television program echoed and extended the same unfulfilled promises of repair Cristina criticized at the trawün, reproducing inequality even as it invited participation. The educators fulfilled their end of this compact, completing the work required for the program, while the municipality failed to deliver. Their participation exposed how populist and multicultural projects rest on affective attachments that sustain democratic aspirations despite institutional neglect. Yet their labor constructing the terraced garden also made visible a different temporal horizon, one grounded in the immediate, collaborative work of making life possible in the present.
Participants in the 2019 trawün were already attuned to the contradictions between the municipal government’s present performance and deferred promises. Rather than reproducing those contradictions, the municipal TV program became a site of negotiation, reflecting a form of democratic decision-making shaped by improvisation, tension, and collaboration across institutional and community boundaries. The associates’ willingness to adapt and continue the gardening program despite institutional failure was an act of perseverance and a refusal to let failure define the limits of democratic possibility.
Figure 7 Still from the Macul municipal TV educational segment on community gardening (2021). The segment’s title, “Con la mano notaremos la textura” (“With our hand we will feel the texture”), instructs viewers in how to assess the qualities of high-quality compost. In this activity, however, the compost featured in the workshop was store-bought rather than produced through the participatory educational process the program sought to represent. Video posted to Facebook by Huertas comunitarias y jardines de Macul. Post archived with the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/httpswww.facebook.comwatchv969667636911613. Original video: https://www.facebook.com/HuertasMacul?__tn__=-UC] on September 01, 2021.
Populist and multicultural recognition attempted to stage participation in representational form, and the associates transformed this staged recognition into ongoing democratic practice. The finished television program presented viewers with an image of collaborative democracy in practice: community composting restoring the soil of a once-fertile valley; neighbors relearning their relationship to food; and Santiago residents cultivating an embodied “sensitivization” toward environmental sustainability through tactile engagement with worms and microorganisms that transform kitchen waste into compost. Yet this fictionalized narrative of ecological repair rested less on the municipality’s fulfillment of its commitments than on the televised representation of autogestión and convivencia. Yet this fictionalized narrative of ecological repair rested less on the municipality’s fulfillment of its promises to workshop participants than on the televised representation of autogestión and convivencia. This representation unsettled the clientelistic dynamics through which municipal governments often regulate Indigenous participation as a form of populist appropriation. [12]
Rather than waiting for municipal delivery or approval, the educators’ labor materialized the very ideals that the televised program sought only to perform for an audience. Although the promised vermiculture program never materialized, the terraced garden continued through compost generated at later educational events held at the center, before the space was eventually repurposed for a new structure (Fieldnotes, June 21, 2023). It was maintained through community-produced compost rather than the promised municipal program, and was eventually dismantled to make way for a structure the associates collectively decided they needed. By maintaining and later repurposing the garden, the associates at the Indigenous cultural center transformed a staged populist image into a lived practice of cooperation, extending democratic action beyond the terms through which the municipal government sought to recognize and delimit community participation.
Conclusion
Contrary to claims that populism implies democracy’s deformation—the moment when popular participation becomes spectacle rather than power (Schwarzmantel & Beetham 2025) —my analysis exemplifies an otherwise democracy. Indigenous and non-Indigenous neighbors reworked the contradictions between populism’s promise of collective self-governance and the material limits imposed by government neglect. What might have stood as a scene of bureaucratic failure and unfulfilled promises became instead a demonstration of how democratic life endures through improvisation, collaboration, and social imagination. The “otherwise” is not an alternative form of democracy. Rather, it is a mode of doing that persists within, and sometimes despite, populist and multicultural regimes of inclusion. Everyday practices at the Indigenous cultural center show how this otherwise democracy is sustained through the ongoing labor of building convivial spaces. The Aymara uta and the televised gardening workshop transformed the state’s infrastructural populism into a mode of self-governance, autogestion, that challenged exclusionary models of citizenship while grounding democracy in relational life. What could have stood as scenes of abandonment instead became refusals to let democratic possibility dissolve into absence. Through these practices, the associates gave territorial expression to an otherwise democracy, revealing that multiplicity, interdependence, and conflict are constitutive of democratic life itself.
Nikola García Johnson is a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University (USA) and the Universidad de Los Lagos (Chile). Their work examines emergent forms of political life and cross-racial solidarities in contemporary Santiago de Chile, focusing on Mapuche communities and neighborhood organizations rooted in the 1960s Poblador Movement. They are currently developing a book manuscript, Emergent Citizenships, which traces the everyday politics of democracy across Mapuche urban and rural worlds in Santiago and Wallmapu (La Araucanía), funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship. Their research has appeared in Political Geography, PoLAR Online, Paprika! A Yale Journal of Architecture, and Lundimatin, among others.
Notes
[1] The Plan de Desarrollo Comunal (PLADECO) is a mandatory citizen participation process guiding each municipality’s four-year development plan. In Macul, consultants from PRAGMAC conducted surveys and town halls on administration, security, environment, Indigenous issues, housing, gender, and social inclusion (PRAGMAC 2019).
[2] In October 2019, high school students’ metro fare protests sparked Chile’s Estallido Social—a nationwide uprising against neoliberalism and the 1980 Constitution. The ensuing constitutional rewrite was later rejected in the 2022 plebiscite (Abufom 2022; Karmy 2019).
[3] Non-sovereign politics names practices that unsettle how sovereignty links to citizenship and freedom. For Yarimar Bonilla (2015), it is a generative condition for alternative political imaginaries beyond state-centered autonomy. Meanwhile, Lauren Berlant (2022) frames it as an affective ethics of interdependence, where agency is partial, distributed, and relational.
[4] In contemporary Chilean political thought, porvenir is often used to name a horizon of political transformation, as in Pablo Abufom’s “A Memory for the Future” (2022) and Rodrigo Karmy’s El porvenir se hereda: fragmentos de un Chile sublevado (The Future Is Inherited: Fragments of a Chile in Revolt) (2019). My use of porvenida signals a different orientation, one that understands democracy as perpetually unfinished: rather than referring to a political horizon still to come, it names democratic possibility as something sustained through everyday practice in the here-and-now.
[5] The Poblador Movement refers to the wave of organized land occupations and self-built housing initiatives led by working-class and migrant residents in Santiago and other Chilean cities from the 1960s through the 1980s. Pobladores—literally “inhabitants,” but socially connoting shantytown dwellers—became central actors in Chile’s struggles for urban citizenship, forging infrastructures of survival and solidarity amid state neglect and repression (Cortés 2014; Paley 2001).
[6] In “Autogestion: Correcting the History of Self-Management,” Liv Stone (2024) notes that the term emerged from the Algerian revolution before being adopted by twentieth-century leftist movements. Its origins lie in Third-Worldist, anti-colonial politics of liberation (Stone 2024, p. 52).
[7] The Global Sixties refers both to a historical period (roughly 1958–1973) and a conceptual framework for understanding local transformations within transnational circuits of political imagination, aesthetics, and contestation (Churchill 2009; Gould 2009; Stone 2024; Widener 2024).
[8] The Nueva Canción Chilena was a folk music movement tied to the Chilean left and the Popular Unity government. It was characterized by its use of Indigenous instruments and the incorporation of rural and working-class musical traditions and narratives of social justice. Peñas were community-run music venues linking political organizing and popular education, hosting performances, debates, and neighborhood assemblies.(Cruz 2019)
[9] Salvador Allende was the socialist president representing Chile’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition (1970–1973), a leftist alliance that included the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario (MAPU, or Movement of United Popular Action), among others. In Chile, lo popular refers not simply to mass participation but to the cultural and political formations of the urban working classes and rural tenant agriculturalists—groups historically racialized as Indigenous or mestizo (Paley 2001)
[10] Oral-history interviews conducted by the author with “Miguel,” a Mapuche educator in Macul (August 12 2018), and “Renaldo,” an Aymaran educator in Peñalolén (January 13 2020).
[11] Miguel Pérez (2022) shows that poblaciones emblemáticas are imagined as sites of resistance and solidarity, where activists contest stigmatizing portrayals and reaffirm traditions of neighborhood organizing and collective identity.
[12] Like many parts of Latin America, municipal governance in Chile often operates through clientelistic networks, where access to social benefits, public works, or employment depends on political loyalty to the parties in municipal office. These arrangements blur the line between social assistance and partisan mobilization, especially in low-income neighborhoods (Gordillo 2008; Verón 2017).
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