Banished from Everywhere: Gentrification Processes in Chilco by Daniela Catrileo

Abstract

In this article I propose an approach to the novel Chilco (2024), by the Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo. I am interested in focusing my reading of the work on the representation of the conflict surrounding the housing crisis in large Latin American cities, which is described in the novel in terms of gentrification. The hypothesis guiding this reflection is that Mapuche writings produced from the cities stage the conflict arising from the land market as a further chapter in the long history of territorial dispossession and forced migration. If, with the consolidation of the liberal state from the republican expansion - called on both sides of the mountain range the Pacification of Araucanía and the Conquest of the Desert - the city meant a safe-conduct for so many indigenous people reduced to their lands; now, in the neoliberal urban reconfiguration, they are once again expelled and forced into displacement. In this sense, the land constitutes, for the urban Mapuche and for other identities in which ethnicity and class intersect, the actualisation of what José Carlos Mariátegui postulated in terms of the 'problem of the Indian', pointing with this syntagma to the lack of land tenure.