Towards a tuwün wariache? Place‐making and creative acts of traversing in the Mapuche city

Abstract

This article addresses experiences of belonging and place‐making among indigenous Mapuche youths in Santiago, Chile. Moving from a collaborative ethnography, it elaborates on the emplacement of the tuwün (place of origin) – usually linked to ancestral territories – within the city, and the meanings this shift entails. Furthering knowledge on indigenous spatiality by addressing migration, the analysis focuses on the ambivalent ways in which memory, affect, and power relations are embedded in urban materialities, and are negotiated through ‘acts of traversing’. The significant relationship between persons and places is conceived as mediated by movement, expanding on the creative possibilities of routing. Moreover, drawing on practice‐based methods, the article argues for a shared engagement with research participants in order to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which place‐ and self‐making in contexts of migration encompass both rupture and creative reappropriation, contributing to current debates on displacement and the sense of place.

Poželjno mjesto za život

“…The border between them is not always clear (Gulin Zrnić 2017: 217). "Contested space" -which occurs not only in the context of crises but also in other active acts of self-making, community building, government initiatives with civic engagement (Casagrande 2021;Gulin Zrnić and Rubić 2018), artistic practices and public events (Gulin Zrnić 2017) -is considered one of the most effective ways of revealing place-making processes (Low 2017: 75). By being a processual phenomenon and affecting different social actors and their relationship with the environment, a disaster becomes a factor and context through which city-making is exposed.…”