Between Political Worlds: Indigenous Citizenship in Chile's Alto Bío Bío

Abstract

The formation of a new municipality comprising the Mapuche–Pewenche communities of the Alto Bío Bío region in Chile offers a prime case for analysing the challenges involved in the exercise of meaningful indigenous citizenship at the local level. This work contributes to the literature on indigenous experiences with local government in Latin America, but its main goal is to re-examine notions of hybridization in the formation of indigenous subjects. While hybridity is often invoked as a successful reinvention of indigenous social and political agency, less attention has been paid to the ways in which hybridization can also be associated with less progressive outcomes. The exploration of ‘hybrid’ indigenous citizenship in the Alto Bío Bío focuses on four nested fields of institutions and socio-political cultures: property rights, community structure, economic development, and municipal government. Despite some counter-tendencies, significant agency in shaping the terms of their encounter with modernity has mostly eluded the Pewenche communities of the region.