The writer Daniela Catrileo in Santiago de Chile on October 16, 2023.SOFIA YANJARI
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There is something in Chilco, the novel that Daniela Catrileo has just published with Seix Barral in Chile, that invites us to open up, to wonder, to be honest. As I read, I thought a lot about my grandmother Angélica, who died in Lima during the pandemic, although her ashes had to wait at least two years to return to her land of Ccapacmarca, in the heights of Cusco. Angélica barely knew how to sign, but she had supported a sick husband and raised her four daughters until they could marry and emigrate to the city. After she was widowed and left alone, Angélica also had to leave her home. She took in one of her daughters in Lima and she spent her final years expressing her desire to return to Quechua.
The story of why my family ended up so far from our country was not a simple migration, but a transplant that produced wounds and silence. I was unable to accompany Angélica’s ashes back to Ccapacmarca, but I received photos via WhatsApp of her burial in this mythical place that I considered mine, even though I never lived there. Ccapacmarca was the land of my mother, my grandmother, my ancestors; and to be fair, I experienced it emotionally through the stories and huaynos I’ve heard at home since I was a child. The songs seemed like stories about heroes in ponchos, brave horses and secret loves; and they were a warm refuge to which I returned when things got ugly in Lima, a city where I never felt comfortable, perhaps because I found no way to express my “quechuidad” there.
Should I try to return to the Andes at a young age? Would I have to settle for a posthumous and ritual return? Is the return a fantasy? Millions of people across the hemisphere are grappling with local and personal variations on these questions in what might be called the grand story of indigenous uprooting. From south to north, from east to west, Latin America is a territory of hearts forcibly expelled from their land. The image of hearts that leave and do not always return, as was the case with my grandmother, is one of the marks left in me by reading Chilco, a book that certainly leaves doors, ears, hearts and locks in the rest of the continent will open. .
Chilco is an island in the southern hemisphere where only children and the elderly live. As soon as they can, Mapuche youth leave to study or work in the cities, and although their uprooting slowly kills them, they never return. Pascale Antilaf and Mari Quispe, her partner, are an exception. We learn about her adventure through Mari, the narrator, the granddaughter of a Peruvian Quechua immigrant, although she was born in the capital and has always lived there. Unlike her grandmother, who made freelance work in her own shop a kind of defense against the world, Mari is a secretary at the Natural History Museum. He is not interested in the history of the Mapuche people or that of Chilco until he falls in love with Pascale at work. Pascale is Mapuche from Chilco, and there is something in her determination to return to this island that fascinates Mari, as if an extra organ in her body is issuing this call.
Daniela Catrileo will present “Chilco” on October 21st in Valparaíso and October 26th in Santiago.SOFIA YANJARI
What could we live on there? Mari seems to ask herself. The major economic obstacle that prevents many inside and outside the book from returning is resolved in the novel when the capital begins to fall apart like a cake crumbling from the inside out. Faced with the metastasis caused by something very sinister in the real estate business, Chilco acquires the dimension of the alive and the possible, and then Mari decides to accompany Pascale in “this strange phenomenon of return.”
There are no spoilers up to this point. The novel begins at the end as Mari breathes in the air of Chilco and is struck by a scent that no one else seems to sense. Catrileo has sown several intrigues that grow like seeds throughout the book, and perhaps the first is that smell. Why is Mari, the only outsider in Chilco, also the only one who notices?
Second: Are we experiencing – are we experiencing – the end of the world? Or is the end of the world, as always, a new phase of capitalism? As people in the capital realize that it has become uninhabitable due to the greed of real estate companies, thousands take to the streets to express their anger. The mass fatigue is reminiscent of the social outbreak of 2019. There is anger, illusions, the dream of something different, but ultimately a reality prevails that becomes even worse than what came before. As soon as the euphoria of the social struggle is over, the capital literally begins to sink. The rich families go to the mountain range to found another city. The sky above the devastation is covered with advertisements depicting blonde people inviting survivors with mortgage loans to buy the new home of their dreams. As the planet begins to look like Gruyere cheese and reality is a never-ending joke, Mari and Pascale decide to use “the protection of laughter as an ideology.” This is also the tone of a book full of tender and angry humor.
The counterpoint with Pascale allows Mari to feel and think things that seemed hidden in her own story. Pascale has a scar on her forehead. Some guys provoked her with a knife while shouting “faggot Indian” at her. In the proximity of this body, says Mari, “our wounds cease to be an individual story and begin to meet.” As between touch and the roughness of desire, transparency appeared on the border.” An ode to complicity, to the contagion, of the political awakening, of what the Aymara author Quya Reyna calls the return to the “Indian”. Quechua style.
Chilco narrates this other return in a more subtle way. The inner odyssey of a woman who believes she is a mestizo but then finds a way out. Mari says she isn’t sure of her origins; In fact, she doesn’t know her father and believes that everyone in the capital is a bit like her: “quilter, without genealogy.” For them, the diverse cultures that coexist and unite in the city give its residents a mestizo identity: “We had grown up in a capital of mixtures, a mixture of nuances, accents and languages.” Soon he begins to feel that Racial mixing, more than biological or cultural mixing, is a form of forgetting with the dimension of a national myth. The belief that a country is essentially a mixing machine that dilutes the locals and that this makes us Peruvians, Chileans and Mexicans. Mari notices the cracks in this speech. She doesn’t have a father, but a mother and a grandmother. In fact, she lives in a women’s shelter, in a neighborhood full of absent men, rape and neglect. “Fatherlessness was the general religion of our territory,” he once says. Suddenly the Quechua grandmother takes on the dimension of a home for her.
“So… if your grandmother is Quechua, you are also Quechua Po, right?” Pascale asks him in their first conversation. What Mari will discover in the face of this question is the third intrigue, which Catrileo leaves open as an interpellation that escapes the book. Pascale is a perfect counterpoint, showing not only the instability of the “mestizo” label, but also the different ways in which indigenous peoples and subjects deal with it. Pascale, whose father is Mapuche and her mother is a white woman from the continent, is, like Mari, a quilter of sorts, but does not see herself as mestizo. “When they ask him where he comes from, he replies that his heart is Chilqueño Lafkenche [mapuche del mar]”, a heart of the sea that does not betray its island.” Reading through the museum’s archives, Mari discovers that this island was never part of Spanish rule, that it retained its autonomy for centuries and that it was only during the Republic, i.e. in “democracy”, was forcibly colonized. For this reason, residents have a “collective desire for independence.” “Mestizo” is the identity of the colonizer, that is, the defeat and the forgetting of this defeat.
Perhaps that is why the fourth intrigue should not go unnoticed. Many people will assume that this story takes place in Chile. Maybe they’ll even look through maps of their coasts to find the mysterious Mapuche and rebellious island they’ve never heard or read about until today. Catrileo feeds this illusion by inserting into the novel archival fragments about the island’s geography, its people, its plants, its history, its sea. Chilco seems so real in the novel that you can see him, touch him, miss him and even smell him. However, the same cannot be said for the colonizing country, as Catrileo initially never mentions it by name. We know that it is in the far south of the continent, that it has an army, police, bureaucracy, a capital, real estate companies and an upper class that builds a historical center and then flees it from hungry and vulnerable “migrants” “Start to deal with it. You ask, like Mari, like Pascale.
It may seem like an anecdotal detail, but we are faced with the most powerful and decolonial mechanism in the novel. Through the delicate and persistent gesture of not naming this land, of obscuring it, Catrileo allows indigenous life and the stories trapped within it to emerge clearly in all their complexity. Not just as actors in a love story, but as protagonists in a political struggle for the right to exist in their own territory. In the real life of bureaucratic acts, constitutions and armies, the world works the other way around: it is the State of Chile that exercises the power not to want to name the Wallmapu, as if by doing so it would erase it from the map. This is the weight of a single word.
The novel is peppered with words in Mapudungún, Quechua and Aymara. Catrileo uses them without translation, as if to emphasize that these languages do not exist in isolation, but flow together like rivers in our own daily lives in the South. Pascale and Mari spend time researching the implications. “Did I know that the word ‘Ahuntarle’ comes from Quechua?” says Mari once. “Also the words Campo, Chascona, Callampa, Huincha, Yapa and so on (…). Dresses? Not everything is Mapudungún.” “Look, Mari, don’t take advantage of this to start the competition,” replies Pascale. “I don’t want to offend either, but you know. “My people are the majority.” Mari responds with the tone of an unusual person in charge of bilateral Quechua-Mapuche relations: “Hey, hey, be careful. In this country they will be the majority, well… but not on the continent. In any case, they will not win in a fragmented way because there are more of them. Who won individually? They need non-separatist alliances.” Isn’t this an invitation to break through the barriers and boundaries that limit even the imagination?
Mari’s speculative calling leads to a dream. After thinking so much about what would have happened if Europe hadn’t done what it did, Mari ends up dreaming of a ship for indigenous astronauts. They speak a mix of Quechua and Mapudungún and instead of conquering other planets, they spread decolonization galaxy by galaxy. As we return to shore, a crowd greets the crew. “The Chola leader looked like my grandmother,” says Mari, before adding, “She saw everything like it was a movie.” I don’t know about you, but I would love to see it in the cinema.
Indigenous literatures in Latin America
Indigenous literatures in Latin America are written in native languages, but also in Spanish. Since the time of Guamán Poma and even before, this has not been a contradiction. “They not only took away our land, but also our language. “Now who can tell me in which language I should write or not,” said to me one day the poet David Aniñir, author of the mythical poetry collection Mapurbe, a term that, like Champurria, describes the Mapuche people born and raised in the diaspora, often faced with the dilemma of racial mixing. Daniela Catrileo, who was born and raised on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile and now lives in the city of Valparaíso, describes her Champurrian origins as a different way of being Mapuche. Although he experienced his own process of returning to Wallmapu several years ago and respects this option, he also believes that migration and diaspora are driving the Mapuchization of new spaces. “Santiago,” he told me in a conversation, “is a Mapuche place.”
The Mexican writer Clyo Mendoza. With kind approval
Chilco is Catrileo’s sixth book and the first published by a transnational label (Seix Barral). This detail has its own complexity, because the so-called “Latin American literature” (that of the showcases, the fairs, the festivals, the major labels) is a very separate Olympus. It is monopolized by the novel and novelists, but moreover refuses to interact with the indigenous literatures of the continent. That “national” and “indigenous” writers share spaces often seems like science fiction, as it suggests communication between artists and aliens. What we call “national” or “Latin American” literature is usually the commercial projection of this open secret.
Chilco brings with it an invitation – and this could be the final intrigue – to explore new ways of reading what is happening and being written on the continent. A way of reading that is no longer based on the canon of national stars, but is able to approach their diverse territories and conflicts and the beautiful voices that emerge from there on such universal topics as (de)colonization, skin , love, recovery, new roots. In this vivid map, the Mapuche literature of Daniela Catrileo, David Aniñir and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, to name but three, contrasts with the Aymara chronicle of Quya Reyna and Raimundo Quispe; with the Quechua novel by Pablo Landeo; with the wonderful poetry of Andean migrants by Lourdes Aparión, Leda Quintana and Gloria Alvitres; with the novels of Clyo Mendoza in the north and Gabriel Mamani in the south; with the insightful essays of Carlos Macusaya and Yásnaya Aguilar… It is a living structure that, like the alliances Mari dreams of in the novel, requires openness and circulation.
What Catrileo’s book ultimately suggests is that Chilco may not be just the name of an island. Maybe it’s the name of an entire continent.
Marco Aviles He is a journalist and doctoral candidate in literature at the University of Pennsylvania.