Race And The Chilean Miracle

The economic reforms imposed by Augusto Pinochet's regime (1973-1990) are often credited with transforming Chile into a global economy and setting the stage for a peaceful transition to democracy, individual liberty, and the recognition of cultural diversity. The famed economist Milton Friedman would later describe the transition as the "Miracle of Chile." Yet, as Patricia Richards reveals, beneath this veneer of progress lies a reality of social conflict and inequity that has been perpetuated by many of the same neoliberal programs. In Race and the Chilean Miracle, Richards examines conflicts between Mapuche indigenous people and state and private actors over natural resources, territorial claims, and collective rights in the Araucania region. Through ground-level fieldwork, extensive interviews with local Mapuche and Chileans, and analysis of contemporary race and governance theory, Richards exposes the ways that local, regional, and transnational realities are shaped by systemic racism in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Richards demonstrates how state programs and policies run counter to Mapuche claims for autonomy and cultural recognition. The Mapuche, whose ancestral lands have been appropriated for timber and farming, have been branded as terrorists for their activism and sometimes-violent responses to state and private sector interventions. Through their interviews, many Mapuche cite the perpetuation of colonialism under the guise of development projects, multicultural policies, and assimilationist narratives. Many Chilean locals and political elites see the continued defiance of the Mapuche in their tenacious connection to the land, resistance to integration, and insistence on their rights as a people. These diametrically opposed worldviews form the basis of the racial dichotomy that continues to pervade Chilean society. In her study, Richards traces systemic racism that follows both a top-down path (global, state, and regional) as well as a bottom-up one (local agencies and actors), detailing their historic roots. Richards also describes potential positive outcomes in the form of intercultural coalitions or indigenous autonomy. Her compelling analysis offers new perspectives on indigenous rights, race, and neoliberal multiculturalism in Latin America and globally.

This book offers rich sociological analysis of the ways in which educational institutions influence indigenous identity formation in Chile. In doing so, Webb explores the mechanisms of new racism in schooling and demonstrates how continued forms of exclusion impact minority groups. By drawing on qualitative research conducted with Mapuche youth in schools in rural and urban settings, and in private state-subsidised and public schools, this volume provides a comprehensive exploration of how national belonging and indigeneity are articulated and experienced in institutional contexts. Close analysis of student and teacher narratives illustrates the reproduction of historically constructed ethnic and racial criteria, and demonstrates how these norms persist in schools, despite apparently progressive attitudes toward racism and colonial education in Chile. This critical perspective highlights the continued prevalence of implicit racism whereby schooling produces culturally subjective and exclusionary norms and values. By foregrounding contemporary issues of indigenous identity and education in Chile, this book adds important scholarship to the field. The text will be of interest to researchers, academics, and scholars in the fields of indigenous education, sociology of education, and international and comparative education.

Chile had long forgotten about the existence of the country's Black population when, in 2003, the music and dance called the tumbe carnaval appeared on the streets of the city of Arica. Featuring turbaned dancers accompanied by a lively rhythm played on hide-head drums, the tumbe resonated with cosmopolitan images of what the African Diaspora looks like, and so helped bring attention to a community seeking legal recognition from the Chilean government which denied its existence. Tumbe carnaval, however, was not the only type of music and dance that Afro-Chileans have participated in and identified with over the years. In Styling Blackness in Chile, Juan Eduardo Wolf explores the multiple ways that Black individuals in Arica have performed music and dance to frame their Blackness in relationship to other groups of performers—a process he calls styling. Combining ethnography and semiotic analysis, Wolf illustrates how styling Blackness as Criollo, Moreno, and Indígena through genres like the baile de tierra, morenos de paso, and caporales simultaneously offered individuals alternative ways of identifying and contributed to the invisibility of Afro-descendants in Chilean society. While the styling of the tumbe as Afro-descendant helped make Chile's Black community visible once again, Wolf also notes that its success raises issues of representation as more people begin to perform the genre in ways that resonate less with local cultural memory and Afro-Chilean activists' goals. At a moment when Chile's government continues to discuss whether to recognize the Afro-Chilean population and Chilean society struggles to come to terms with an increase in Latin American Afro-descendant immigrants, Wolf's book raises awareness of Blackness in Chile and the variety of Black music-dance throughout the African Diaspora, while also providing tools that ethnomusicologists and other scholars of expressive culture can use to study the role of music-dance in other cultural contexts.

Uncertain Citizenship explores how Bolivian migrants to Chile experience citizenship in their daily lives. Intraregional migration is on the rise in Latin America and challenges how citizenship in the region is understood and experienced. As Megan Ryburn powerfully argues, many individuals occupy a state of uncertain citizenship as they navigate movement and migration across borders. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research, this book contributes to debates on the meaning and practice of citizenship in Latin America and for migrants throughout the world.

This book explores traditional and contemporary concerns surrounding gender and ethnicity in Chile through a textual analysis of historical novels depicting seventeenth-century figure, Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer. Drawing on theories from the Global North and South, it incorporates postcolonial perspectives and decolonial feminist methodologies to expose patriarchal, Eurocentric hierarchies constructed during the colonial era, which remain in Chilean society today. Through close readings, the book demonstrates that it is in the inconsistent and fluid depictions of characters that identities are deconstructed and reconstructed in ways that defy and transform social norms. This is the first extended English-language study of this infamous historical figure, who is more widely known as la Quintrala. It is also the first to compare the literary portrayals by Mercedes Valdivieso and Gustavo Frías. Looking beyond the infamy which usually shapes interpretations of la Quintrala, the author presents these novels as an embodiment of the anxieties surrounding hybridity in Chile, where European heritage has traditionally overshadowed indigenous concerns, and patriarchal norms dominate the construction of gender. Written during a period of social and political upheaval in Chile, it makes a timely contribution to existing works in social and political science, popular culture and the ongoing discussions of this iconic figure.

In the wake of recent protests against police violence and racism, calls to dismantle problematic memorials have reverberated around the globe. This is not a new phenomenon, however, nor is it limited to the Western world. De-Commemoration focuses on the concept of de-commemoration as it relates to remembrance. Drawing on research from experts on memory dynamics across various disciplines, this extensive collection seeks to make sense of the current state of de-commemoration as it transforms contemporary societies around the world.

National majorities and their governments often demand that immigrants and other minorities must be “good”: they should work hard, contribute to society, and adapt to dominant cultural norms. Such stereotypical labels for national outsiders, ranging from “good immigrants” to “good Muslims” and “model minorities”, imply that their inclusion and recognition becomes conditional on fulfilling certain standards of behaviour and identity that are predetermined by the national majority. The affected minorities respond in diverse ways, at times striving to be recognised as “good” and at times rejecting these regimes of conditional inclusion and citizenship openly. This book offers ground-breaking insights on how these dynamics of conditional inclusion and “good” citizenship play out today, with a focus on migrant and immigrant-origin minorities in Europe and the Americas. This book shows that conditional inclusion is a globally widespread tool for controlling and rank-ordering minorities. As immigrants respond through diverse struggles for inclusion and recognition, these struggles reveal a hidden battleground of citizenship on which minorities negotiate who can be included and accepted in a given state or society. Their experience shows that conditionality is not an outlier of citizenship, but rather one of its universal core principles. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Chile was the first major Latin American nation to carry out a complete neoliberal transformation. Its policies—encouraging foreign investment, privatizing public sector companies and services, lowering trade barriers, reducing the size of the state, and embracing the market as a regulator of both the economy and society—produced an economic boom that some have hailed as a “miracle” to be emulated by other Latin American countries. But how have Chile’s millions of workers, whose hard labor and long hours have made the miracle possible, fared under this program? Through empirically grounded historical case studies, this volume examines the human underside of the Chilean economy over the past three decades, delineating the harsh inequities that persist in spite of growth, low inflation, and some decrease in poverty and unemployment. Implemented in the 1970s at the point of the bayonet and in the shadow of the torture chamber, the neoliberal policies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship reversed many of the gains in wages, benefits, and working conditions that Chile’s workers had won during decades of struggle and triggered a severe economic crisis. Later refined and softened, Pinochet’s neoliberal model began, finally, to promote economic growth in the mid-1980s, and it was maintained by the center-left governments that followed the restoration of democracy in 1990. Yet, despite significant increases in worker productivity, real wages stagnated, the expected restoration of labor rights faltered, and gaps in income distribution continued to widen. To shed light on this history and these ongoing problems, the contributors look at industries long part of the Chilean economy—including textiles and copper—and industries that have expanded more recently—including fishing, forestry, and agriculture. They not only show how neoliberalism has affected Chile’s labor force in general but also how it has damaged the environment and imposed special burdens on women. Painting a sobering picture of the two Chiles—one increasingly rich, the other still mired in poverty—these essays suggest that the Chilean miracle may not be as miraculous as it seems. Contributors. Paul Drake Volker Frank Thomas Klubock Rachel Schurman Joel Stillerman Heidi Tinsman Peter Winn