Rights and Recognition Anita Carrasco

Culture as Resistance in the Chilean Andes: An Indigenous Community’s Struggle for Rights and Recognition

by ANITA CARRASCO, Associate Professor of Anthropology I first heard about Likantatay more than 20 years ago. I was sitting in one of my undergraduate anthropology classes listening to my professor go on a tangent, telling us about a new community that was pretending to be indigenous in order to get benefits from the State. “How do you pretend to be indigenous?” I wondered in silence as my professor went on to explain that they were urban poor squatters who had gone as far as to plant crops like corn and alfalfa, raise animals such as pigs and goats, and practice some ceremonies for the Earth Mother just to be able to claim indigenous identity. My professor seemed very convinced about his interpretation, so I didn’t dare challenge him by asking him why he thought someone would even bother to engage in the hardships involved in farming and animal husbandry just to fake an identity. The tangent was over and class was dismissed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Likantatay. Our end-of-semester assignment was to write an evaluation of an applied anthropology project. I got my hands on a movie available in Santiago’s Pre-Columbian Art Museum’s film collection that documented a visual anthropology workshop that had been held and recorded not long before with representatives of seven Atacameño indigenous communities from the Loa River Basin (Likantatay, Lasana, Chiu Chiu, Cupo, Ayquina-Turi, Caspana, and Toconce). Two anthropologists had put together a project to run a documentary film-making workshop with seven indigenous people, teaching them how to use video cameras and some basic editing skills. The purpose was for them to document their customs and traditions. I thought it was a neat idea, but my professor was very critical of these other anthropologists. He argued that they were essentializing and romanticizing culture. Furthermore, they were imposing their ideas of what was important to document: “tradition.” But what if, he pondered, the individuals from the participating communities wanted to document their kid’s birthday party, Western style with cake, candles, and balloons? When my anthropology course was over, I promised myself one day I would visit Likantatay to find out for myself if they were really farming, raising animals, and practicing rituals to “stage” an indigenous identity. Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston once wrote about investigation: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein” (Hurston 1942, 174). Franz Boas, founding father of American anthropology and her advisor, whom she referred to warmly as Papa Franz, had a genius for “pure objectivity,” she reported. By this she meant that he outlined his theory, but if the facts did not agree with it, “he would not warp a jot or dot of the findings to save his theory.” He simply instructed his students to go to the field and find out “what is there.” That is what I set out to do. My curiosity about Likantatay didn’t fade over the next five years, when I finally found the opportunity to visit the community, now with an elegant excuse: my master’s thesis. I vividly remember my heart pounding with a mix of fear and excitement when, for the first time, I set foot on the dirt road that led to Likantatay, this urban indigenous community located in a Calama mining town in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.When I reminiscence about that day, I can still smell the overpowering stench of feces that the wind blew in my face. I had been told about the nearby sewage water processing plant and I thought it was unfortunate to have to live right next to one. This essay documents the story of the Likantatay people’s fight for their rights and recognition in the face of mining. But before I begin, I want to set the tone of this text by summoning the words of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein that feel to me especially fitting to describe Likantatay’s struggle for cultural survival: “People resist exploitation as actively as they can and as passively as they must.” In 1991, a group of 36 Atacameño immigrant families from interior rural villages, driven by the marginal conditions in which they lived, decided to petition the Ministry of Government Property for land and started a squatter settlement in a former pasturing zone in the poverty belt of the city. It was barren land with no public services or houses to live in. These families had to build their homes from the ground up. Most Lila Colamar (left) and Anita Carrasco in the Atacameño village of Toconce, 2014 PHOTO COURTSEY OF THE AUTHOR

Satellite image of Likantatay (center) and neighboring plots, 2020

GOOGLE MAPS/GOOGLE EARTH CNES TECHNOLOGIES

10 Agora/Spring 2020 were slum dwellings with dirt floors and makeshift construction. Likantatay’s resilience is unprecedented in the region. They have fiercely resisted the manifold aggressions of copper mining on their community: displacements from a rural lifestyle because of the mining companies’ voracious extraction of water in the desert and the threat of a forced resettlement due to the existence of copper ore beneath their land. They are still fighting today. From its very beginnings the people of Likantatay have asserted that their main objective, found in their mission statement, has been to reconstruct the traditional community, but in an urban space. The central goal of Likantatay is to embrace an alternative life-making project that is to live in community, preserving Atacameño culture. From the time when the Ministry of Government Property gave a formal concession of lands to Likantatay in 1992, this community, that started as a squatter settlement in 1991, has developed many projects for the creation of a village, but in the city, that aims to resemble the lifestyle in the rural villages they migrated from. Each family initially received an average of 0.85 hectares that they used for planting alfalfa, corn, and raising animals. In a 1966 aerial view of Calama, one can already appreciate that agriculture has always competed with mining in this oasis in one of the driest deserts in the world. Some of their community projects have included building roads, preparing land for agriculture (it took them four years to wash the land and desalinate it to make it adequate to plant their first crops), constructing internal canals, constructing a church for the celebration of their patron Saint San Juan as well as a community meeting hall and a craft workshop, installing a potable water matrix and electricity for their homes, and acquiring land titles, just to name a few of their achievements. The community participated in all these projects through the work of shared labor, which is an important component, they say, of the customs and traditions as practiced in the rural villages. An outsider visiting the community may see these buildings and think they lookramshackle, but they mean the world to them.

Reconstructing the Traditional Community in the City

What is the community-based lifestyle of the peoples from the interior rural villages that members of Likantatay have so perseveringly tried to reconstruct? This is an important question because that “lifestyle” has been a fundamental frame of reference for an understanding of the “nostalgic practices” found in the development of indigenous identities in urban contexts such as Likantatay. Practical nostalgia was a term coined by anthropologist Deborah Battaglia in her study of urban Trobrianders, a tribe first made famous by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his 1922 ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Battaglia studied them more than 70 years later and found many of them had become urbanized. She defines their nostalgic practices as all the practices that urban indigenous people carry out by means of a selective process of “tradition” that they consider represents their “legitimate” indigenous identity. Practical nostalgia is also observed among urban Atacameños. In his now classic book The Invention of Culture (1975), Roy Wagner develops an interesting perspective of culture as a work of art, where creation plays a central role in making culture visible. His approach fits the case of Likantatay quite well. Wagner argues that creation is embedded with invention, which is not to say that people are fake, but rather that the power of invention is what gives the people of a culture some control over the opportunities they create for themselves in their collective struggles for rights and recognition. In Wagner’s words: “The necessity of invention is given by cultural convention, and the necessity of cultural convention is given by invention. We invent so as to sustain and restore our conventional orientation; we adhere to this orientation so as to realize the power and gain that invention brings” (Wagner, 1975). He further argues that invention and convention stand in a dialectical relationship to one another, a relationship of simultaneous interdependence and contradiction. This dialectic is the core of all human cultures. The concept of dialectic is mostly familiar in its Hegelian and Marxist formulation as a historical process involving a succession of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Wagner’s formulation is closer to the original Greek idea of a tension or dialogue-like alternation between two conceptions or viewpoints that are simultaneously contradictory and supportive of each other. In this regard, Likantatay members find themselves in a continuous process of creation that embraces a communitarian

lifestyle as dictated by convention, where family tasks are combined with collective work that was common to the agricultural activities and pastoral circuits of their rural past. The following testimony recounted by an older woman from Likantatay illustrates the cultural convention that this community is drawing inspiration from in the necessity they face of having to forge an invention of life in the city, as life in the village:

In the villages, we did not have magazines, newspapers, sodas, tea, coffee, sugar or anything. All we had was natural stuff--for example, my grandmother made corn chicha, that was what we drank [...] My grandmother used to travel to San Pedro de Atacama on her donkey, she wouldn’t come back in 15, 20 days, even a month. She knitted crafts--blankets, socks, hats--and my grandfather knitted male accessories. They both travelled to San Pedro de Atacama and they would exchange their artisanal clothes for corn and fruits like pears and figs. My grandmother would stock the produce to provide for the family during the entire year. Everything was done by means of exchange, there was not any money involved (Interview, January 2005). The community-based lifestyle is also filled with elements of what anthropologist Lautaro Nuñez has referred to as Andean Spirit (Núñez, L. 1991:233). These are the set of practices that the Atacameños refer to as “the customs” (las costumbres). For the people of Likantatay, these are key markers of what they see as their “legitimate” indigenous identity. They include practices such as ritual payments to the Earth Mother or Pachamama, carnival, the ceremony of the dead, communitarian work, cropping the land, and raising animals. Life in the interior villages, they say, was marked by the systematic practice of these costumbres. This, of course, is not easy, especially in the context of life in the city where capitalist values are in constant circulation. In a fascinating conversation with one of the founding members of the community, the only one with a college degree at the time, I was told the following: We are inserted in the context of a country that embraces a market economy. Our essence is communitarian, so it’s the exact opposite of a market economy. So you can imagine how terrible it is not just for us, but for the entirety of the Atacameño world to survive in a system that seduces many people with consumerism. We want to try to change that in a certain way, of course with the tools that we have, that are very few. We won’t hurt the system, but we aspire to create a conscience that all the things that you do will always have a cost and a consequence (Interview, Likantatay 2005). machinery, figure out where to get water because there was none. For a while we worked on a nearby well trying to see if we could extract water from there. We worked on it for a number of years until in the end we realized that the water we could extract from that well was not going to be enough to water all our farms. Then later we started looking at sewage water that passed nearby, looking into that, looking at what our neighbors from Cerro Negro were doing, which was irrigating with sewage water. We observed the system they had for extracting this water. How can I put it to you any other way, it was like stealing

IMAGES BY RICARDO TAPIA, COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR A group of community members push a heavy pipeline into the canal ditch, Likantatay, 2004.

Water Problems

From the start, the biggest challenge faced by Likantatay was WATER. They had difficulties obtaining irrigation water, so they had to make a tough choice to break a sewage water pipeline owned by the water company that ran near their lands. They began irrigating with this water the company was dumping in the desert. In an interview about this story, I asked them how they managed to start planting. I was told the following:

When we first arrived, the first thing we had to start doing was preparing the land for planting —we had to move the earth with from someone else. That’s what we had to do to survive-- steal--and the people from Cerro Negro were our teachers. One of the leaders behind the canal odyssey concluded: “We always felt it was terribly unjust that we had to irrigate with that water because in our rural villages we always had clean and pure water for our land.” The waters of rivers and streams had gradually diminished as a consequence of the irrational politics of extractivism of mining companies in the region, which of course caused severe damage to the ecosystems that Atacameño communities lived in. Without water, communities had

little choice but to migrate, because Atacameño culture is founded on pastoralism and agriculture. Land and water, pacha and puri, are sacred elements of Atacameños and without them they are certain they are doomed to disappear as a people. Likantatay irrigated with untreated sewage water for the course of ten years (1992-2002), but the community always had the aspiration to irrigate with treated sewage water. They felt it was a disgrace that the water company was dumping 400 liters per second of untreated sewage water in the Quetena creek, knowing that they lived in one of the driest deserts in the world, in addition to the obvious environmental pollution this entailed. The community engaged in a number of efforts to contact the relevant government authorities and the company in charge of the sewage water that was being dumped in the desert (back then the company was called ESSAN, now it is known as Aguas Antofagasta). The community wanted to ask the company if they could recover those waters for agriculture. They were unsuccessful in their pleas. Time went by and the sewage water treatment plant became a reality, but unfortunately for the community, the company had economic interests at stake and it became impossible for Likantatay to afford the high cost of the sewage water the company was now treating for sale as a commodity. Losing this important source of irrigation water was devastating both financially and emotionally. Now, among other measures, the police were aggressively guarding the pipeline and community leaders had been threatened that they would be thrown in jail if they failed to comply with the law. This loss motivated the community to request the purchase of water rights from the Loa River to the National Corporation of Indigenous Development (CONADI) through their Indigenous Water fund. To their good fortune they were successful and in May of 2002, CONADI bought 52 liters per second of superficial waters from the Loa River for Likantatay. Juana Tomic, a wealthy landowner in the vicinity, sold water to Likantatay. She had promised herself that if she ever sold water, it would never be to a mining company. There are records of people selling 1 liter per second of water for up to 300 hundred thousand dollars in this desert, so having ownership of 52 liters per second is not minor. Likantatay’s struggle for water was far from over. They still needed to find a way to bring the water, located 2.1 kilometers away, to their plots. Yet again, the community engaged in a number of efforts to build a canal from the ground up and channel the waters in their direction. Many opposed them; however, they did gain the support they needed and in coordination with the relevant government offices Likantatay was able to reach agreements with the four farmers from whom they needed permission to pass the canal through their property. Finally, they managed to start building the canal in 2004 thanks to the last important source of support, ironically coming from the same mining company that triggered increasing migration from the country to the city in the region. Codelco mining company donated 102 steel pipelines of 25” of diameter, 12 meters long and weighing 1,000 kilos each, costing approximately 500 per pipe. These pipelines were abandoned at the village of Lasana, and the community took the initiative, with the help of the regional minister of agriculture, to contact Codelco to make the request. Codelco agreed to the donation as long as the community dealt with the transportation of the pipes to Likantatay. The Institute of Agrarian Development (INDAP) financed the transportation after the community presented a written proposal with a detailed budget that underwent evaluation before being funded.

The Canal

The community was determined. They urgently needed to irrigate their land. Five months had elapsed without watering their crops and their alfalfa was drying out. In August of 2004 they started the construction of the canal. There were several community members who had worked building pipelines for the mining company when it was owned from the 1920s to 1971 by the gringos of the Anaconda Mining Company. These community members, their parents, or grandparents had the know-how of dealing with pipes and, evidently as farmers themselves, they were competent in canal-related infrastructure. They had to summon this knowledge to make a number of decisions including but not limited to: tracing the route that the canal would follow, designing it, measuring the slope on the terrain, negotiating with the different farmers to get permission to go through their properties, and the list goes on. All the construction work was done on a community basis every Saturday and Sunday between August of 2004 and March of 2005. No one in the community missed a single day of work. At the end of March of 2005, they tested running water through the entire extension of the canal, with favorable results. The water made it to Likantatay without trouble. What a relief! In all, the community had raised the amount of 50,000 US dollars to cover all the costs associated with the odyssey of building a canal with their bare hands. I first did anthropological fieldwork in Likantatay in December of 2005. Back then I had the opportunity to attend several community work sessions where these farmers continued to improve the canal in areas where the slope would sometimes slow down the arrival of water to their fields. Most of the members of Likantatay were seniors and they all looked exhausted, and somewhat frustrated, because nine months earlier when they first launched the canal they thought this struggle was over. But no, here they were again, in the summer in mid-December sweating under the sun, breaking their backs with the hardships involved. As someone coming from a privileged background who only has to open a tap to get water, it would be insulting of me to suggest I could ever really understand what Likantatay’s struggle for water meant to them. In conversations with one of the community leaders back then, he reflected on the basic yet tremendous problems they had to resolve in the making of their traditional community but in an urban space:

First here in Likantatay there was no drinking water, we solved that. Then there was no electricity, which

was something people really hoped for, we solved that. We had no land titles, and that by the way was one of our biggest fights. We ended obtaining land titles in a record time of 10 years. The neighboring community adjacent to Likantatay, they are squatters like us in the beginning, they are not indigenous though, and they have been around here for more than 50 years and still, they have nothing. That creates a lot of envy, and people in Calama always accuse Likantatay of being privileged. But that’s not true, our community achieved everything through unity and organization. For example, electricity, it wasn’t easy. It involved three occupations (tomas) of the governors’ office, several public protests, and formal letters of complaint to a number of government offices. Because we understand how things work in this country: pressure. Everything in Chile works through pressure (Likantatay, Interview 2005). I remember the day I was first trying to locate the leader of Likantatay to ask for permission to begin doing research in the community. I knocked on a random door, thinking I was already in Likantatay, but instead I was really in the neighboring squatter settlement known as Verdes Campiñas. A man opened the door and introduced himself as Eduardo. He informed me that I was in the Chilean community; Likantatay were the Bolivians next door (a pejorative term used to refer to indigenous peoples by some people in Chile). Without my prompting, Eduardo explained that CONADI (National Corporation of Indigenous Development Government Office) incited racism in the country. In his opinion, what this government office really did was to preserve a “zoo of indigenous peoples for the gringos” for their aesthetic pleasure during their cultural tours of underdeveloped countries. “If we are talking about indigenous heritage,” he added, “we all have some percentage of indigenous blood in us. Everyone here, indigenous or not, are all poor. However, the government only supports indigenous people!” (Interview, Calama, December of 2005). Eduardo spoke in resignation as he gave me another example of the inequality he perceived. He pointed out that Likantatay had ownership of a potable water matrix, but the Chilean neighbors like himself couldn’t access that water unless they paid. “Likantatay charges outsiders who want to access this water,” he lamented. I later asked members of Likantatay about this issue and they responded that they worked hard on obtaining this resource and if they didn’t value their own work, then no one else would. People who did not work on this project should pay, they concluded. Eduardo, the Chilean neighbor, had a different interpretation: “they are just selfish.” He continued on a racist rant claiming that indigenous peoples in general are used to getting assistance from the State, they like to ask for a lot, and many of them are also alcoholics. Despite his negative perception of his indigenous neighbors, Eduardo did recognize their incredible capacity for organization and their unity as a group. He lamented that Chileans were more individualistic and did not look out for one another in the same way.

Forced Resettlement

In May 2007, the Codelco mining company, yes, the same one which donated the 102 pipes, approached the community and held a meeting in which they communicated their intention to begin Finished irrigation canal in Likantatay, 2005

prospecting under Likantatay to determine if the existing copper found there was “high grade.” If so, they explained they would start negotiations with the community with the goal of either resettling them or providing monetary compensation. In that meeting, Codelco took a highly ambiguous position and did not make any concrete offers to the community. They talked in terms of “perhaps and maybe in the future.” Under pressure from the community leaders at the meeting, who asked the Codelco representatives what they meant by “the future,” mining reps said the “future” would not happen any time before 2020. Codelco promised that they would come back to inform people about further developments in their exploration plans; but since May of 2007 there has been no official news from the company, only informal interactions. This lack of communication lends itself to pervasive waves of speculation within the community. This spreads anxiety and creates internal divisions. “Internal divisions” or pre-impacts in the community are already reflected in each family’s differing perspectives. To illustrate the range of opinions in the community and their internal divisions over Codelco’s visit, I selected three testimonies out of the 32 recorded in conversations that took

place during ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation in 2008. Far from being homogenous viewpoints, Likantatay families have diverse assessments of their place in the system and the alternatives that appear viable to them in the event that Codelco strikes them with a forced resettlement: (1) “In case of being forced to negotiate, the money has to be good, but above money I would prefer that Codelco gave jobs to at least one of the sons or daughters of each family. What I most hope for though is for Codelco to buy land and relocate the entire community together, that would be best.... This should include our meeting hall, a church, everything just as it is in Likantatay here today.... We struggled for our drinking water and for our crops; we worked hard in the construction of a canal and we are still struggling. Sadly, Codelco doesn’t respect us, they see the indigenous and farmers as an inferior kind. People from Codelco believe themselves as superior” (Interview, October, 2007). (2) “Codelco has to set up two strategies of negotiation with us: an individual one and a collective one and even if it exasperates them, the collective level has huge weight. Here in Likantatay it’s just as in any place, everyone thinks differently, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t a community. There’s a decisive factor and that is that Likantatay has collective legal titles for its irrigation water, it is the property of the community and if one of its members doesn’t participate in its processes and decides to leave, their water rights stay in the community.” (Interview, December, 2007). (3) “Codelco offered us to move to the land next to the river, the Tomic land. They’re nice, but what about pollution? We would be next to the mining deposit that Codelco wants to open in the west side of Calama city. They would poison us, poison our animals, and poison our crops. And afterwards when we suffer the consequences of pollution, they would say to us: ‘but, we paid you’” (Interview, September, 2007). As these testimonies suggest, there is a great diversity of viewpoints in the community, so we can anticipate the complexity that future negotiations will entail. There is another important factor that influences the decisions that the families have to make: their involvement or detachment from what was described as “rural lifestyle” and las costumbres. There are many families that are not willing to abandon their rural lifestyle orientation, but there are others that are seduced by the idea of their family’s “progress” and Codelco appears to them as the only opportunity for them to change their lives to an orientation in direct contradiction to the one they practice with pride.

Pan-Andean wiphala indigenous flag

The Fight for Sewage Water

Dignity is not a minor issue in the context of this story. To put the Likantatay struggle for survival in perspective, I want to share excerpts from an interview I conducted in 2005. The conversation revolved around their fight for sewage water, and the structural violence represented by the prospect of first having to leave their rural village because of mining development and now potentially having to abandon Likantatay again because of mining development. Paradoxically this story about human dignity also expresses the unique nostalgia the people of Likantatay have for the times when they could irrigate with sewage water: Q: I know that when you first arrived at this place it was barren, but what economic activity allowed the people of Likantatay to stay here? A: When people first came here, they were living with relatives, or in farms by the river. They owned animals, but they did not own land. Once they came to Likantatay, it meant that they had a place of their own where they could keep their animals, so when they settled here they started preparing the land for cultivation. Then they built corrals for their animals, and of course they started thinking about where to get water for their crops. They discovered that there was a well nearby. They tried extracting water from there first, but it was impossible. The other closest water source to Likantatay was the sewage water disposed by Aguas Antofagasta (ex ESSAN), the water company. So what did people do? If they wanted pasture to feed their animals, they needed to find a way to irrigate even if they had to do it with sewage water. So people made a decision. They tried extracting sewage water by breaking the pipeline. Then they built canals and started distributing water among the different community members’ plots. Their land was ready, so they started planting just like that. Q: And how long did you do this without being caught? A: Shortly after people were caught, sanitary authorities came, ESSAN came, government authorities came. They forbade the use of sewage water for our crops. But the community could not sit idly. We needed to survive. Q: What did they tell you? A: They warned us about hepatitis, that the water was not suitable for crops, that the land we were occupying should have never been given to us, that it’s not apt for agriculture. But people were already hopeful. They had already prepared their plots of land, they had built their houses. What else were they going to do? Anyhow, it was forbidden. Back then the community leader knew that the families were in such harsh financial need that he went ahead and suggested we break the pipeline again, just in another section. And people continued irrigating. This time it was serious. There were arrest orders, [and] the police were looking for the community leader to take him to jail. He had already been warned, so he went into hiding. We insisted to the authorities that we were not planting lettuce, nor produce to be eaten raw. We argued that we were only interested in food for our animals to eat:

corn and pasture. We were being careful, it wasn’t huge quantities of production, [and] we were not going to cause problems for the city of Calama. We argued that we were organized, that we had an irrigation shift system and all. So finally they gave us a provisory authorization to continue irrigating. And a couple of years went by, and another year, and another, and people got used to the system. However, in private conversations we had amongst ourselves, we were aware that it was an immense humiliation the state was committing against us, having to irrigate with sewage water, especially because we had to migrate from our villages because the mining company Codelco and the water company took our water, and there was not enough water left to continue farming in our rural villages. So when people tried recovering a space here in Likantatay, here in Calama, to be put in the position of having to water our crops with sewage water was a disgrace. People left their rural villages because Codelco took their water. And here we were fighting for water with shit! (Interview, Likantatay 2005). I have a confession to make. In my career as an anthropologist there is a before and after: before Likantatay and after Likantatay. The story of their struggle was inspiring for me not only as an anthropologist, but as a person. I can safely say that getting to know Likantatay made me, for the first time in my life, want to emancipate myself from my own culture. It took me years to figure out why Likantatay made me feel this way until I had an epiphany when I read anthropologist David Graeber’s book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. In it he points out that many societies in the ethnographic record endorse basic principles of anarchism, which literally means “without rulers” (Graeber 2004: 3). Some of these principles include: autonomy, self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid, direct democracy, and the rejection of all forms of structural violence, inequality or domination. Although they never used the word “anarchists” to describe themselves, Likantatay embraces all these principles. Likantatay’s non-declared anarchist spirit is especially true when it comes to their approach to decision-making. Most anarchist groups operate by a consensus process. Graeber provides a good overview of what this process entails: In a consensus process, everyone agrees from the start on certain broad principles of unity and purposes for being for the group; but beyond that they also accept as a matter of course that no one is ever going to convert another person completely to their point of view, and probably shouldn’t try; and that therefore discussion should focus on concrete questions of action, and coming up with a plan that everyone can live with and no one feels is in fundamental violation of their principles. Rather than be based on the need to prove others’ fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to find particular projects on which they reinforce each other (Graeber, 2004: 8). I was told repeatedly that Likantatay’s biggest strengths were organization, mutual aid, and collective decisionmaking and action. Even their Chilean neighboring squatters from Verdes Campiñas who openly envied Likantatay agreed. The canal is a powerful example of the anarchistic strengths of Likantatay. David Graeber also points out that “Anarchists tend to argue with each other about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, or at what point organization stops being empowering and starts crushing individual freedom” (Graeber 2004: 5- 6). In sum, anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. This brings me to the end of my essay, an anarchist joke: “Q: How many voters does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. Because voters can’t change anything.” (Graeber 2004:77) Likantatay certainly didn’t change the circumstances of their own destiny by their ability to vote; rather, everything they changed was accomplished by embracing a striking revolutionary praxis.

A Final Note on Cultural Survival

During the Q & A in this Paideia Lecture, one student raised the question about what the future holds for Likantatay. Do they continue to be so organized? Do they continue to be so united? I brought these questions to Lila Colamar, my best friend from the community. I told her how people in the Luther College audience seemed genuinely moved by their story and what Likantatay had gone through as a community. I could see the emotion in their faces as I glanced at them from the podium. A colleague told me later that evening over a glass of wine that: “not even in a movie, a filmmaker could have come up with all the problems Likantatay faced in real life.” It’s an important story to document, I went on to say to my friend Lila, and she agreed. She told me something I was acutely unaware of. In the present, the youths from Likantatay don’t even know their own story. They have no idea about the details behind the canal odyssey and all the struggles for water their parents and grandparents had to go through to build their village in the city from the ground up. Their indigenous leaders today struggle to motivate the youth, she lamented. What my Atacameño friend believes needs to be done is to teach. Teach the young about their own stories and others like it. Stories like this one can’t be forgotten. Their collective memory of struggles is the main source of inspiration they need to be drawing from to secure cultural survival into the future. I was blessed to meet Lila Colamar 15 years ago when in 2005 I was pursuing a master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson. That year I travelled to Chile to conduct fieldwork in Likantatay. Initially, my research goal was to document the oral history of the arrival of the people of Likantatay to their land. I was interested in documenting the process of indigenous migration from rural villages from the Loa river and San Pedro river basins to the poverty belt of Calama as a consequence of mining development. I had a list of questions I wanted to ask the elders from the community, but first I asked Lila to help me with my work. She became the most outstanding research assistant one could ever hope for. Lila soon realized that my questions were written in an academic style that

16 Agora/Spring 2020 would be difficult to understand for the elders in her community. She helped me edit my interview schedule and translate it into questions people could connect with. For example, my question about the origins of the community read something like this: “Could you tell me about the processes you went through to forge a life in this new space?” Lila masterfully translated this to: “When you first arrived here, were there any trees? What crops did you start planting?” With her help, I was able to collect excellent narratives of the oral history of her community and the impacts of copper mining on their lives. Thanks to that experience, I didn’t hesitate to ask Lila to work with me when I returned to northern Chile in 2015 with a group of 16 Luther College students for a Study Abroad course about the impacts of mining and tourism on Atacameño rural communities. Lila did outstanding work as a cultural guide for our students, making the course a success. Her charisma, her intelligence, her excellent sense of humor, and her ability to explain native concepts left our students enchanted with her both as a person and as a teacher. During the 15 years of our friendship and collaboration we have remained in touch. Currently we are working on a new project to document her life story. We have completed eight in-depth interviews, but it constitutes a project for the long haul. The idea was born out of the inspiration we experienced reading the life story of her uncle, Julián Colamar. In the publication Julián Colamar Recuerda, which appeared for the first time in 1996, anthropologist Pablo Miranda Bown documented the life story of this Atacameño from the village of Caspana, Lila’s home village. This book contains invaluable information about the ways of life carried out by Atacameños in the rural villages. Lila represents some continuity of the fight to maintain a culture alive in spite of the politics of extractivism and water grabbing from the hands of the mining industry in the region and the consequent displacements of rural indigenous peoples from the country to the city. Water losses have made agricultural and pastoral ways of life no longer viable for many Atacameños. Lila’s story goes back to when she was five years old and her mother had to migrate to Calama in search for work opportunities. Her father had passed away from cancer, so her mother needed to find work to support and provide an education to Lila and her three siblings. Lila’s mother never cut ties with Caspana and would travel back frequently to work the land, raise her animals, and partake in one of the most important traditional ceremonies among Atacameños until the present: the cleaning of canals, or water fiesta. Lila’s mother had a ritual role, PuriLila Colamar celebrating Indigenous People’s Day, Calama, 2018

kamana or water master, who, in this ceremony, leads the community in their collective act of gratitude toward Earth Mother or Pachamama for her blessings and the life she gives. Lila followed her mother and observed her example of the love she professed for the Earth Mother. Lila’s mother passed away from cancer in 2012 and on her death bed she begged Lila to follow in her footsteps with respect. With much fear, Lila accepted her mother’s request. She wanted to carry out this ceremonial role with dignity, and she has committed to being Purikamana with utmost humility in the cleaning of canals ceremony, because her mother asked her to do it. That has been her cultural leadership and she hopes that the new generation of youth do not forget their roots. This is why she is highly motivated to obtain a college degree from a new technical intercultural education program recently being offered by a state university in northern Chile, to which she is applying. This program was created in response to a recent initiative from the Ministry of Education to eventually require schools to offer a mandatory indigenous culture course for all K-12 students in Chile. IMAGE BY RICARDO TAPIA, COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Lila has also been an active member of Calama’s Indigenous Association of Traditions and Customs, precisely with the goal of compiling and preserving traditional Atacameño knowledge that has suffered the impacts of colonization; and what better example of this violence than the extinction of the Ckunza language. Lila’s leadership is materialized in her enthusiasm for living her culture and setting an example for future generations of Atacameño youths, and what better way to accomplish this than through her teaching. In the school where Lila works as a para

teacher, she notices how there are many young people who come from the rural villages, yet feel shame for their culture. She doesn’t blame them, given the racism and discrimination that indigenous peoples suffer in the city. What Lila has done to support the young people is to organize workshops for the recognition of indigenous people’s day. And in an interactive walk-through exhibit she explains to them and shows them the importance of the cleaning of canals, the relevance of community work, the importance of water, and the legacy of their ancestors. Her biggest joy comes when later she can see these youngsters, who at the beginning were shy, awaken and realize that their culture is magnificent and that they should feel pride, not shame, for being Atacameños. In a beautiful example, Lila shared with me her pedagogy as para-teacher and how she has embraced the role of assuring that the kids in her school who are indigenous respect their culture, know about it, and ultimately become proud of it. She reported to me that she starts off her workshop by telling her students that they know her as the simple para-teacher, but on this day, she wants them to get to know her as Lila Colamar, an indigenous woman from Caspana. “Look at how I am dressed today, look at my braids,” she tells them. Inside her exhibit room she displays a powerpoint slide with the Whipala, a square emblem commonly used as a flag to represent some native peoples of the Andes in an area that includes parts of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. The Whiphala is composed of a 7 × 7 square patchwork in seven colors, arranged diagonally. Lila took the time one summer to make 49 real sized cushion pillows representing all the colors and squares of the Whipala. She asked for the help of co-workers and family to assist in sewing these cushions. The day of the exhibit, she throws these cushions in a disorganized manner all over the room’s floor. Pointing at the picture on the powerpoint she instructs the children to team up and build the Whipala with the pillows available to them. After they scramble and make some decisions, they finally get the job done. Lila interrogates them: “What did you do, how did you manage to build the Wiphala?” The kids respond with pride that they started looking at who had what colors and subdivided into teams and together they all decided how to proceed and worked out a system. This is when Lila pauses to congratulate them and explain: “What you all just did, that there is community work.” What the ancestors have practiced in the villages since time immemorial “is not a concept I can explain to Lila Colamar (left) and Anita Carrasco in Lila’s home village of Caspana, in front of her mother’s house where Lila was born. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

them in theory,” she tells me. “I have to help them live it.” Cultural survival is yet another manifestation of resistance and resilience, the topic of this year’s Paideia Lecture Series. What I learned from Likantatay’s story is that to fight for cultural survival you have no choice but to change the world you live in. To fight for cultural survival, you have no choice but to be anti-systemic. In the words of Immanuel Wallerstein: “to be anti-systemic is to argue that neither liberty nor equality are possible under the existing system (capitalism) and that both are possible only in a transformed world.

References

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