https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520915435
Sociology
2021, Vol. 55(1) 129 –145
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1 77/00380385209154
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Who Counts as an Authentic 
Indigenous? Collective  
Identity Negotiations in the 
Chilean Urban Context
Dana Brablec
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
While increasing numbers of Indigenous peoples worldwide live in cities, mainstream research 
and practice continue to render urban indigeneity invisible and assume that Indigenous groups 
remain confined to a rural homeland. As a strategy of resistance to assimilation to their nation-
states, Indigenous peoples in cities have tended to foster conceptions of ethno-cultural purity to 
defend their threatened cultures. Building on the literature on socio-cultural hybridity and based 
on ethnographic information, this article discusses the ways in which the Mapuche members 
of Indigenous associations in Santiago de Chile understand their indigeneity as urban dwellers. 
While the article reveals that the content of what counts as ‘authentic’ Mapuche-ness may vary 
for each individual, the Mapuche, framed by the collective participatory environment offered by 
their urban associations, attempt to perform, as best they can, the dominant understandings of 
what counts as indigeneity.
Keywords
authenticity, cities, ethnicity, hybridity, Indigenous associations, Mapuche, urban indigeneity
Introduction
As a reflection of the growing trend of global urbanisation, cities are rapidly becoming 
the main residential site for Indigenous peoples worldwide, representing one of the most 
important challenges faced by modern Indigenous groups. Land dispossession, poverty, 
militarisation, natural disasters, lack of employment opportunities and the deterioration 
of traditional livelihoods have contributed to Indigenous peoples’ urban migration. 
Indigenous peoples in cities often face particular challenges that make them vulnerable 
Corresponding author:
Dana Brablec, Sociology Department, HSPS Faculty, University of Cambridge, Centre of Latin American 
Studies, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT, UK. 
Email: dab70@cam.ac.uk
915435 SOC0010.1177/0038038520915435SociologyBrablec
research-article2020
Article
130 Sociology 55(1)
to a range of socio-political and economic inequalities (Horn, 2017). While a growing 
proportion of Indigenous peoples live in cities, mainstream research and practice con-
tinue to render urban indigeneity invisible and assume that Indigenous groups remain 
confined to a rural ancestral homeland. Once native people leave their rural homelands 
and move to cities, critics assume that urban Indigenous migrants lose their connection 
with their ancestral territory and, by extension, lose their Indigenous identities (Bello, 
2002; Imilan, 2009).
The shaping of Latin American countries’ identities has entailed a simultaneous and 
mutually overlapping development of state and nation in which Indigenous peoples have 
occupied an important place in the foundational myths of the nation-state. The incorpora-
tion of Indigenous peoples into the nation-building process has corresponded with the 
melting pot conception which was converted into a founding myth of Latin American 
mestizo nations; that is, the mix of European, Amerindian and African identities. 
However, the actual components of the melting pot myth are, in many cases, relegated to 
the background, giving way to the symbol of national identity: the mestizo individual. 
Helped by the centripetal force of the educational systems, Indigenous peoples in Latin 
America were incorporated into modern nation-states in a precarious form with strong 
incentives towards assimilation and acculturation, quickly constituting the poorest seg-
ments of these societies (Curivil, 2001).
In a crucial bid for Indigenous cultural recovery, practice and maintenance in cities 
have been the roles displayed by Indigenous organisations (Thiers, 2014; Van Cott, 
2007). The Mapuche people in Santiago de Chile have not been an exception. As a result 
of the long-standing consequences of a state-based campaign to annex Indigenous terri-
tory during the 19th and 20th centuries, a large proportion of the Mapuche have been 
forced to abandon their lands, migrating to cities in order to find better life prospects. Of 
the Mapuche, 35 per cent are congregated in Santiago (Censo, 2017) which is nowadays 
the city that concentrates the largest proportion of Mapuche individuals in Chile. The 
high proportion of Mapuche population in Santiago has corresponded with an increasing 
number of urban associations, which currently amounts to 81 (GORE, 2016). Mapuche 
associations have presented a space for the collective re-creation of the homeland through 
the organisation of cultural activities that foster a sense of belonging to the territory of 
origin but also to the host milieu. The Wallmapu, as an alleged true home, embraces 
emotional notions that evoke romanticised sentiments of nostalgia for what is now lost 
and has to be recovered, prompting practices of belonging through these activities which 
are actively performed and re-created within Mapuche associations. Accordingly, 
Mapuche associations in Santiago have been playing a crucial role in the revival and 
exercise of Mapuche cultural features appreciated as emblematic of an ‘authentic’ 
Mapuche identity.
This article advances a novel understanding of the complexities behind the claims for 
an Indigenous identity in the framework of a contemporary city context. To this end, this 
article examines the different identity categories created and implemented by the 
Mapuche to classify each other in relation to the possession or fulfilment of features 
appreciated as central components of an ‘authentic’ Mapuche ethnicity. The article builds 
on ethnographic information to explore how ideas of Indigenous authenticity have 
impacted the ways the Mapuche understand their indigeneity as urban dwellers. While 
Brablec 131
the article reveals that the content of what counts as an ‘authentic’ Mapuche may vary in 
each Indigenous association, ‘the authenticity prejudice’ (Albuquerque, 2011) remains 
structurally the same. Here, Albuquerque is referring to how urban Indigenous individu-
als are forced to perform, as best they can, the dominant understandings of what counts 
as indigeneity. By recognising the complexity behind the notions of belonging and 
emplacement, this article reflects on the interplay between elaborations based on ‘the 
authentic rural’ and ‘the hybrid urban’. The article contributes to the growing scholarship 
on urban indigeneity by reflecting on the tensions of authenticity the Mapuche face when 
claiming an Indigenous identity from Santiago de Chile.
Tensions in Primordial Sedentary Approaches of 
Indigenous Authenticity
One of the greatest myths about Indigenous peoples is their inevitable loss of identity in 
favour of the majority when they move to the city. In contrast, various studies (Maidana, 
2013; Restoule, 2005; Warren, 2017) have demonstrated that Indigenous peoples in cit-
ies are strongly oriented towards continuing their Indigenous identity collectively. 
However, even with their increasing residence in urban areas and the multiple strategies 
followed to re-create their culture, Indigenous identities have been widely assumed to be 
sedentary, that is, confined to an ancestral homeland. While Indigenous peoples indeed 
have an overarching attachment to their homeland (Watson, 2010), they have been pre-
sented as imprisoned by an attribution of physical and ecological immobility, that is, an 
incarceration ‘by what they know, feel and believe’ (Appadurai, 1988: 37), without the 
ability to reconstruct their identity beyond the homeland borders as Indigenous residents 
in cities. Once Indigenous peoples move to the urban setting, primordial sedentary views 
maintain that the connection with the ancestral homeland is lost and so is their indigene-
ity. This has resulted in a conditioning of Indigenous peoples to live up to ideologies of 
authenticity from which the non-Indigenous society is excluded. As a result, Indigenous 
dwellers in cities are perceived as less authentic, less legitimate and an even more dys-
functional people (Gagné, 2016). As Smith (2012) maintains, this conception limits con-
temporary Indigenous actors’ agency and options by establishing expectations of 
authenticity combined with accusations of identity invention and illegitimacy.
Similarly, this article challenges this essentialist line of argumentation by maintaining 
that Indigenous identities persist in cities after migration. This article understands ethnic 
identities as fluid, leading individuals to consider the milieu beyond its physical dimen-
sion, usually accompanied by different forms of cultural representation. Therefore, new 
environments, such as the urban one, can acquire symbolic meaning (Becerra et al., 
2017) upon which Indigenous peoples can construct and reconstruct identity. As the 
Mapuche researcher Ramón Curivil (1997: 5) maintains, ‘today, Mapuche identity is no 
longer territorial, which does not mean that currently there is no Mapuche territory. This 
rather means that inhabiting a certain territory is no longer decisive in the construction of 
the identity of a people.’ In this way, Indigenous diasporic identities are subject to a per-
manent re-organisation in terms of a search for preservation while being subject to a 
transformation of their ethnic boundaries in cities.
132 Sociology 55(1)
As in the case of other Indigenous peoples worldwide, the dominant conception of 
Mapuche culture and history still reproduces Indigenous narratives that restrict Mapuche 
socio-political issues to the geographical boundaries of rural Chile. When in Santiago, 
the Mapuche are mostly seen through the lens of poverty, stripping them of major ethnic 
considerations. Despite the circumstances that triggered migration, Indigenous rural-to-
urban resettlement has usually been viewed as an abandonment of their identity and 
assimilation into the majority society (Peters, 2011), with cities signifying sites of alleged 
cultural loss. Cities dominated by the ‘other’ non-Indigenous agent become emblems for 
identity hybridisation processes in contrast to the assumed authenticity of the rural-
Indigenous milieu.
The term hybridity has been productive from its origins in biology and botany to its 
reclamation in the work on diaspora from authors as diverse as Hall, Bhabha and Gilroy. 
The most conventional accounts assert hybridity as the process of cultural contact, trans-
fer, mixing and exchange. By questioning ideas of purity and homogeneity, hybridity has 
challenged one-sided definitions of national, cultural and ethnic group identities as well 
as individuals’ identities (Raab and Butler, 2008). Following a constructivist identity 
standpoint, Hall (1989) wonders if there is any point when an identity is fulfilled as iden-
tities are always in a process of production. Identities are thus entrapped by what Hall 
(1989) calls two simultaneously operative vectors: the vector of similarity and continu-
ity; and the vector of difference and rupture. Indigenous identities in urban areas seem to 
fit in this dialogic relationship in which modern urban elements play a double role of 
being part of the mainstream as well as being a challenge to primordial ideas of authentic 
indigeneity. For authors such as Gilroy (1994), the same idea of hybridity implies an 
inevitably binary distinction between something that is or used to be pure, and something 
that has lost its quality of purity and become mixed. However, for Ewing (2006), the 
notion of hybridity has been important for valorising the identities of those who occupy 
culturally in-between spaces; in-betweenness provides ‘the terrain for elaborating strate-
gies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity’ (Bhabha, 
1994: 2).
Ideas of hybridisation have been particularly pronounced in Latin America. Post-
independence discourses and material manifestations of mestizaje envision the future by 
valorising Indigenous peoples’ glorious past and heroic resistance to Spanish conquerors 
(Smith, 2012). De la Cadena (2006) recognises that there has been a tendency among 
western scholars to identify the notion of mestizo with that of 19th-century hybridity and 
translate it as the mixture of two previously pure racial identities: the Amerindian and the 
European. During the 19th century in Chile the ideas of assimilation and homogenisation 
were conceived as the only ways to generate a national identity that would fit into the 
project of a unique and unified common homeland. Hybridity was paired with concep-
tions of impurity associated with the mestizo given the inherited connotation of the social 
order being altered by the biological and cultural mixture of members from different 
categories. As a result, the mestizo individual was usually conceived of as occupying the 
intersection of two social constructions: as an improved Indigenous individual but, on 
the other hand, as a synonym of degeneration due to the mixture with the same Indigenous 
element (De la Cadena, 2006). De la Cadena (2006) highlights the role of Latin American 
states in the constitution of racial regimes of power in relation to privileged social groups 
Brablec 133
that impose their image on those considered to be inferior. As a result, efforts were made 
to indoctrinate peoples so as to create national cultures by letting Indigenous cultures die.
During the 20th century, hybridisation theories started to leave behind negative con-
notations of inferiority, contamination and perversion (Raab and Butler, 2008). As 
pointed out by Gutiérrez (2010), the thesis of the degenerated Chilean mestizo of the 19th 
century gave way to a patriotic reaction that exalted the mestizo. The Chilean population 
found new horizons of national pride based on their mestizo identity as bearers of the true 
national values. However, in the Latin American nation-state building and consolidation 
processes, essentialist discourses of indigeneity have left an increasing number of 
Indigenous peoples living in cities vulnerable to allegations of inauthenticity (Paradies, 
2006). Social and geographical orthodoxies, for different reasons, have been propagated 
by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. Usually, the neoliberal state 
demands authenticity by recognising the rights of Indigenous peoples who ‘have been 
relatively untouched by history’ (Paradies, 2006: 361), that is, in the words of Rivera 
Cusicanqui (2010), to those indios permitidos (sanctioned Indigenous) who comply with 
social, political and economic criteria imposed by their corresponding states. By doing 
this, the nation-state denies the actual existence of Indigenous peoples who have been 
able to overcome the forces of colonialism by adapting to the new historical circum-
stances. Framed by an international Indigenous movement mostly articulated from the 
rural setting to secure lands, natural resources and a legal framework that reproduces 
colonial-based ideologies (Gagné, 2016), Indigenous peoples worldwide have frequently 
adopted an essentialist stance on the homeland as a strategy of resistance ‘against national 
governments and multinational corporations’ (Watson, 2010: 272). The Mapuche have 
not been alien to these claims. Through an essentialisation of identity, Campos et al. 
(2018) note that the Mapuche relationship with public authorities in Santiago has been 
based on the strategic use of folklorisation to obtain state recognition of rights.
While the essentialist connection between identity and the Mapuche homeland, the 
Wallmapu, may appear as a politically required depiction of Mapuche society, it creates 
a series of obstacles for the majority of the same Mapuche people who currently live in 
cities. This includes the perpetuation of stereotypes that reduce indigeneity to rural 
dwelling (Appadurai, 1988; Horn, 2017; Watson, 2010), anachronistic perceptions of 
indigeneity as pre-modern in which traditional ways of life are out of place in the fast-
moving globalised world (Yashar, 1998) and the supposed contradiction between indige-
neity as local-rural and urbanisation as global non-Indigenous (Appadurai, 1988). As a 
result, the understanding of Indigenous forms of identity resignification outside the 
boundaries of the homeland is overshadowed (Watson, 2010). This condition promotes 
the concealment of the experiences Indigenous peoples have in the urban milieu includ-
ing the history of migration which frames new expressions of political activism and 
organisation over time. By understanding rural-to-urban Indigenous diasporas through 
the lenses of hybridity, ‘in-between’ individuals have a degree of comprehension of, at 
least, two sets of identity categories, namely, the identities of their homeland and those 
of the receiving milieu, allowing movement with a relative degree of flexibility between 
two supposedly opposite identity worlds (Dahlman, 2004).
The Mapuche’s modern geography reflects a complex process of colonialism, depri-
vation, migration and urbanisation that essentialist primordial approaches do not fully 
134 Sociology 55(1)
account for. Indigenous residence in urban areas, rather, casts serious doubts on ideolo-
gies of authenticity that couple indigeneity with homeland dwelling as a requisite to 
Indigenous identification, opening new theoretical routes towards cultural hybridism 
(Brown, 2011; Tuck and Yang, 2012). As Jacobs (2014) maintains, ethno-racial identities 
are the products of both macro-level historical forces and micro-level interactional 
events. Doubtlessly, the sustained consequences of conquest and colonisation have 
affected identity conceptions of the ‘us-Mapuche’ and the ‘others-non-Mapuche’.
Methodology
This article is part of an ongoing ethnographic study that started in 2015 on identity re-
creation practices developed within Mapuche associations in Santiago. The methodology 
builds on De Souza’s (2016) Epistemologies of the South proposal, by which the author 
makes a call to recover and valorise the epistemological diversity of the world. To this 
end, the emphasis of the study was on empowering the Mapuche participants through the 
development of horizontal, fluid and dialogical links that made them an active part of the 
research process. This study endeavoured to overcome paternalistic limitations by per-
forming the role the Mapuche memberships decided for me in all those activities for 
which I was accepted. As a result, collaboration was developed fluidly over time. This 
created several possibilities for reciprocity that ranged from cleaning venues, serving 
food in ceremonies and writing projects for the application to public funds for the devel-
opment of activities.
While participant observation and in-depth semi-structured interviews constituted the 
main research methods, for this article, the main focus is on the interviews with 34 
Mapuche members of urban associations. The associations included in the study were 
initially selected from a directory of urban Mapuche associations based on a random 
sample. In later stages of the fieldwork, and building on the contacts already generated 
within the initial set of associations, the selection process became a snowball approach 
resulting in a total of 11 associations. The sample used in this study excluded those asso-
ciations that were not linked to the organisations that were the facilitators of information 
for the snowball. The mixed random/snowball sampling approach resulted in a sample 
that focused on associations that prioritised cultural recovery and that tended to engage 
in close negotiations with the state, especially at the local-municipality level. 
Consequently, other types of associations, such as those that had a more confrontational 
approach towards the state, were not incorporated into the final sample. These associa-
tions were located in eight different socio-economic municipalities including El Bosque, 
La Florida, Macul, Maipú, Peñalolén, Providencia, Puente Alto and Santiago Centro.
Gaining access to the 11 associations was an ongoing process of negotiation and 
building rapport. As a native Chilean, although coming from a European and not a 
Mapuche or mestizo background, my access to the associations relied on the distance 
generated between me and pejorative Chilean/mestizo considerations. However, the per-
ception of me as an educated non-Mapuche woman, placed me in a more powerful posi-
tion which, in turn, afforded me more legitimacy to participate in the associational 
activities. This was also reflected in the high level of access received from the public 
sector at the local, regional and national levels.
Brablec 135
The selection of interviewees was intended to consider Mapuche individuals from 
different backgrounds such as different rural-to-urban migrant generations, diverse lon-
gevity in the association, gender and age, among other areas. The final sample was 
formed by 23 women and 11 men, with an age that ranged from 21 to 72 years old. 
Questions asked during interviews followed an open-ended format in which the use of a 
questionnaire helped to have a consistent idea of the thematic areas of the interview 
without restricting the process. The questionnaire to Mapuche memberships encom-
passed 35 open-ended questions organised around four themes: basic information about 
the participant; ethnic identification trajectory; Indigenous organisational trajectory and 
ideas on ethnic collective work; and the relation with the urban milieu. Depending on the 
willingness and time constrictions of the interviewees, 10 interviews were conducted in 
public spaces and 19 in the association’s meeting place. In five cases, interviews were 
undertaken in the homes of the interviewees. In turn, depending on the participant’s 
request and after having signed the consent form expressing this permission in writing, 
interviews were audiotaped.
After transcribing and translating the interviews from Spanish into English, aiming to 
preserve the voice of each interviewee, data were analysed following a traditional socio-
logical course based on grounded theory. When asked about the ways in which they 
understood their ethnicity when living outside their ancestral territory, the interviewees 
offered explanations which revolved around three categories, all introduced by the same 
participants: warriache, champurria and awinkado. These categories were not the initial 
foci of the research, but over the course of dozens of interviews and several months of 
fieldwork they emerged as recurrent topics. A subsequent period of field research was 
conducted in Santiago to discuss and re-frame the empirical analysis considering the 
comments received from this study’s Mapuche participants. The result of these multiple 
conversations is presented in the following lines.
Urban Mapuche or Warriache
The notion of ‘urban Mapuche’ began to be freely used in the 1980s by Mapuche organi-
sations involved in a political resistance against Pinochet’s dictatorship in Santiago. 
Later, the concept was incorporated by the state and used in the Indigenous legal frame-
work. During the 1990s and from the same Mapuche diaspora in Santiago (Alvarado, 
2016), the neologism warriache (warria: city; che: people), emerged as a category that 
sought to endow the Mapuche experience in the city with a sense of identity beyond rural 
essentialisms as well as represent the fluidity of the Mapuche diasporic experience. The 
Mapuche contemporary identity is based on complex processes of colonial continuity in 
which instruments of domination, classification and hierarchisation ‘of bodies and biog-
raphies’ (Alvarado, 2016: 140) crystallise as means of socio-cultural configuration. 
However, warriache opens a reflexive angle that challenges uniformity within the 
Mapuche society by posing the urban, the new and the hybrid in perspective of a word 
that is born from the Mapuche language.
The terms ‘urban Mapuche’ and ‘warriache’ have been equally used to refer to the 
Mapuche in cities (Imilan, 2009). Together with differentiating the urban from the 
rural-Indigenous identities, the term warriache aims to creatively update the historical 
136 Sociology 55(1)
territorial identities linked to the ancestral homeland by creating a new geographical 
division, the city, for those urban Mapuche dwellers. However, an understanding of 
warriache is far from reaching consensus. While some interviewees claimed that the 
warriache identity represented a political stance by claiming an urban indigeneity in 
Santiago, others maintained that this new category only served to fracture the Mapuche 
people even more. One example of this tension is offered by Marcelo (pseudonyms 
used throughout the text). Marcelo was born and raised in Santiago by his rural com-
munity-born Mapuche parents. Marcelo has been one of the main leaders of his asso-
ciation located in a peripheral area of Santiago. When asked about his Mapuche 
identity, Marcelo replied:
I admit being 100 per cent urban. I am urban because my family, social and community lives 
are developed in the city, not elsewhere. My territory is my place of origin, where I was born, 
that is, the city. When I speak of urban Indigenous people, I am not aiming at separating one 
reality from another, we are all Indigenous.
Marcelo is clear in stating that he is not fostering a categoric divide between a rural 
and an urban reality. The distinction noted by Marcelo relies on notions of territorial 
identity. According to Marcelo, the territory for the Mapuche individual is where the 
person is born and raised and, most importantly, where the family and closer community 
are based. Distancing himself from diasporic conceptions that tend to define the territory 
and community of origin as the one and true homeland, Marcelo regards Santiago as his 
territory because both his family and community, represented by his urban association, 
are currently based in Santiago. In the current construction of Mapuche identity narra-
tives, two notions occupy a significant role: tuwün (place of origin) and kupalme (paren-
tal descent). As noted by Imilan (2014), tuwün and kupalme become spatial metaphors 
that articulate the production of identities and a sense of collective Mapuche belonging. 
However, these identity narratives are in tension with the experience of the Mapuche 
who live in the capital, given that Santiago is located outside the Wallmapu borders. 
Nevertheless, the growing proportion of Mapuche people living in Santiago has been 
challenging traditional ways of appropriating and inhabiting urban space, redefining for 
some people like Marcelo what Mapuche-ness actually means. However, the vast major-
ity of the Mapuche interviewees declared a discomfort with the use of warriache and its 
urban connotations. In this group of people is Carla, Marcelo’s mother and current leader 
of their Mapuche association. Regarding the urban category, Carla maintains:
The person who does not know the culture is the one who mixes things. That person says urban-
Mapuche. Most of us are in Santiago not because we want to but because we were forced to 
migrate. We are part of the same people, the Mapuche.
Carla views the use of ‘warriache’ and ‘urban Mapuche’ as inappropriate cultural 
stances that create a new identity category different to the historical Mapuche one. As a 
result of an alleged cultural ignorance of some Mapuche, identification categories are 
used to classify individuals in regard to their place of residence, a practice that is not part 
of a traditional Mapuche worldview. Rural and urban categories do not correspond to the 
Mapuche territorial centre represented by family geographical origin, tuwün, located 
Brablec 137
within the boundaries of the Wallmapu. While several Mapuche interviewees declared to 
have generated a sense of belonging in the city, the majority of them resisted the idea of 
presenting a new territorial identity. Carla also states that her residence in Santiago did 
not respond to a willingness to leave her territory of origin behind but to the extreme 
poverty she had faced in her community. Because of this forced uprooting, Carla seems 
to emphasise that she, as an urban dweller, is still part of the same Mapuche ethnic group. 
Younger Mapuche generations born in Santiago have also sustained a similar opinion. In 
this sense, Claudio points out: 
Warriache is an invention of people who do not know their culture. It should not be used 
because we are Mapuche here and wherever. When talking about warriache we are thinking 
like Winka.
Claudio discards the idea of the warriache as a new Mapuche identity by claiming 
that it represents an alien neologism that does not respond to their history as people. As 
something perceived as external to the Mapuche, the warriache conception is appreci-
ated as something less Indigenous and therefore closer to the Winka mindset. The term 
Winka refers to the non-Mapuche or white person, used by the Mapuche to denote the 
Spanish and later the Chilean people to whom different pejorative moral conceptions are 
attached. To distance himself from this less-Indigenous warriache identity, as a Mapuche 
who was born in Santiago, Claudio specifies that identity is not necessarily related to a 
geographical dwelling but to a knowledge of the Mapuche culture. In consideration of 
this position and based on her own experience as a Mapuche born in Santiago, Millaleo 
(2006) maintains that there is a deep resistance among the Mapuche to accepting an 
identity grounded in urban precepts. According to Millaleo (2006), presenting the urban 
milieu as a form of territoriality would imply the emergence of a new collective memory 
linked to modernisation processes typical of the Winka society. However, while effec-
tively immersed in modernisation processes, the Mapuche ancestral territory helps create 
a diasporic identity among the Mapuche in cities, constituting the ethos of urban 
Indigenous associations. While identity can be re-constructed from Santiago, the collec-
tive memory of the Mapuche seems to be rooted in a rural sense of territoriality.
Champurria
Champurria originates from the Spanish term champurrar, inheriting its original mean-
ing of mixing different elements (Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, 2018). The 
concept was introduced to the Mapuche vocabulary at some stage during the colonisation 
period, marked by the active border economy between the Mapuche and the Spaniards, 
and later between the Mapuche and the Chileans (Pinto, 2000). From its linguistic origin 
denoting a mixture of liquors, the term was extended to signify race mixture, being 
exclusively used today by the Mapuche as an identity marker. From a biological perspec-
tive, champurria is comparable to the understanding of mestizo; however, they are not 
synonyms, as mestizo reflects a separate social category (Webb, 2013). While from a 
biological perspective, champurria relates to a Mapuche and Winka mixture, from a 
cultural perspective, it differs from the mestizo conception by denoting an identification 
with the Mapuche realm.
138 Sociology 55(1)
As maintained by De la Cadena (2010), it is impossible to separate the components 
that form Indigenous-mestizos as indigeneity has always been in an in-between space, 
that is, as part of modernity and also different, therefore, never fully modern. However, 
the term mestizo has usually referred to the adoption of the dominant groups’ identity 
when recognising, at the same time, a biological and even a cultural mixing with the 
Indigenous component. Modern-day discourses still tend to uncritically assume mestizos 
as closer to the colonising side by overlooking their Indigenous heritage. In the case of 
Chile, this has been the result of a history based on the replication of colonialist hybridity 
discourses that have affected the way in which Chileans conceive mestizos, mestizaje and 
race, determining positions of power. The conception of the mestizo in Chile is the result 
of a historical social construction that seeks societal homogeneity, thus allowing govern-
ments to speak of a unique sense of national identity: chilenidad. This construction of 
social uniformity is challenged by the champurria and its identity response found in the 
Mapuche sphere (Alvarado, 2016). From a Mapuche point of view, this identity is not 
pure, but it enables its bearers to demarcate themselves from the dominant Chilean cul-
ture. However, not all Mapuche accept that champurria are one of them.
As a result of the coexistence between the Mapuche and the Winka cultures, the cham-
purria as an in-between identity has been paired by some Mapuche with a pejorative 
conception linked to the idea of being less Mapuche and more Winka. As Hutnyk (2005) 
maintains, the idea of ‘borrowing’ is sometimes taken to imply a weakening of cultures 
as a result of an alleged sterile mix. Ana was born in Santiago to Mapuche parents. 
During the interview, Ana expressed her discomfort regarding her urban dwelling 
because the proximity to the non-Indigenous ‘other’ leads to the loss of an alleged purity. 
In this regard, Ana suggested:
I do not want to be an urban Mapuche. But my husband is not Mapuche, unfortunately. It is 
super difficult to find a Mapuche partner, especially here in Santiago. They are all champurria, 
all mixed. That is why I am participating here [the association] because I want my family to be 
with other Mapuche.
Ana classifies herself as an urban Mapuche given her upbringing in Santiago. Her 
Mapuche ancestry, reflected in both her family branches, has led Ana to discard a cham-
purria identity. However, Ana identifies the majority of the Mapuche in Santiago as 
champurria, given the difficulties of maintaining an alleged racial purity when having a 
Winka partner. As a consequence of their geographical dispersion within cities, intermar-
riage is frequent among the Mapuche. As part of an authenticity project, Ana decided to 
approach an urban Indigenous association to help her own mixed-race children to main-
tain their identification by having cultural contact with other ‘pure’ Mapuche in Santiago. 
If her attempts are successful, Ana’s children will be Mapuche champurria; that is, the 
biological mixture of Mapuche and Winka blood but self-identified as Mapuche people. 
Despite the understanding of champurria as blood hybridisation, some members of 
Mapuche associations have tended to appreciate a relationship with   cultural hybridisa-
tion. Vanesa was born and raised in a rural Mapuche community. In regard to how she 
lives her Mapuche identity in the city, Vanesa says:
Brablec 139
I try to reach an intermediate point. If I live here among the Winka, I have to divide 
myself; I am Mapuche, but I am also a bit Winka. One becomes halfway champurria, 
making connections with the Winka. That impacts the way I see my spirituality. Because 
the Winka make prayers, they respect the saints as much as I respect chawngechen, my 
Father.
During the interview, Vanesa presented as an identity preservation strategy in 
Santiago what appears to be a selective adaptation to the Winka society. By choosing to 
adopt certain Winka cultural traits, Vanesa stated that her identity has become more 
champurria in Santiago. Contrary to Ana’s opinion, Vanesa’s appreciation of the cham-
purria identity seems not to be pejorative but rather a legitimate alternative for those 
Mapuche who are immersed in the Winka culture. However, Vanesa was born and raised 
in a rural community, acquiring important Mapuche cultural traits. In this regard, Vanesa 
says that she is able to select the elements she wants from the Winka culture and discard 
those she does not wish to incorporate into her life. As maintained by Chambers (1996: 
50), most accounts assert hybridity as the process of cultural mixing in which diasporic 
individuals ‘adopt aspects of the host culture and rework, reform and reconfigure this in 
production of a new hybrid culture or “hybrid identities”’. Vanesa illustrates her cham-
purria identity approach in the spiritual area, which appears to be an informed compari-
son more than an unconscious religious syncretism. Appreciated as in-between the 
purity of the rural-Indigenous subject and the urban-Winka, numerous members of 
Mapuche associations in Santiago tended to self-identify as Mapuche champurria, evi-
dencing their cultural and racial mestizaje.
Awinkado
Different to the previous two categories, awinkado leaves little room for other interpreta-
tions: it is frequently used in a derogatory sense. The word awinkado comes from the 
Mapuche term Winka. As pointed out by Caniuqueo (2006), its use has led to the estab-
lishment of an ethnic border through which both actors, the Mapuche and the Winka, 
have been raised in ideological colonial categories. The concept of Winka has not only 
had a racial significance that points to those individuals that phenotypically look as out-
siders to the Mapuche group but has also inherited a pejorative ethical conception based 
on a historical distrust that is operative to this day. However, as stated by Barth (1969), 
ethnic borders are problematic and dynamic. It is in this same complexity that the notion 
of awinkado is situated. The Mapuche individual becomes an awinkado when crossing 
the border from what is understood as the ideal Mapuche and approaches the way of 
being that is attributed to the Winka (Hernández and Pezo, 2010). In that sense, the 
awinkado is the one who challenges the Mapuche ethic and begins to behave according 
to what the Mapuche conceive as Winka cultural codes.
Sergio has lived in Santiago for more than 20 years and is a leader of his Mapuche 
association. For his upbringing in the leading family of a Mapuche community, Sergio is 
particularly critical of what he appreciates as a profound identity loss by the Mapuche 
who migrate to Santiago. Sergio says:
140 Sociology 55(1)
When the Mapuche arrive in the city, they suffer a human transformation. Although they have 
a face that they cannot get rid of, they think they are Winka. They say, ‘I want to have my car, I 
want to dress like a Chilean’. That is why I do not accept the concept of ‘urban Mapuche’ or 
‘warriache’. Because when you become a warriache, you forget your roots, your origin and 
your way of being Mapuche.
For Sergio, awinkamiento (the process through which the Mapuche identity approaches 
the Winka) is intimately related to the uprooting of the Mapuche’s traditional geographi-
cal environment and its consequent urban residence close to the non-Indigenous ‘other’. 
This, according to Sergio, would lead to the moral transformation of the Mapuche. Even 
when trying to conceal their Mapuche identity, Sergio maintains that the Mapuche can-
not get rid of their Indigenous phenotype. For Sergio, then, the problem is from a cultural 
behavioural perspective: dwelling in the city, conceived as a quintessentially Winka envi-
ronment, dilutes the purity of the Mapuche essence. As pointed out by Alvarado (2016), 
migration to the city implied a loss of status within their rural communities for those who 
migrated, becoming awinkado given the supposed acquisition of the codes and customs 
of the Winka ‘other’. In this sense, Sergio appeals to an image of authenticity in which 
the Mapuche would lose their purity by leaving the rural milieu of Indigenous peoples 
and by adopting trends and owning goods that are attributed to the non-Mapuche. As 
Paradies (2006) suggests, education and material assets generate suspicion within the 
Indigenous community. The concept awinkado assumes the existence of a pure Mapuche 
that is being questioned as a product of the sustained contact with the ‘other’ Winka. As 
a result of this quasi-betrayal committed by the Mapuche awinkado, Sergio is against the 
warriache and the use of urban adjectives to refer to his Mapuche peers, as both concepts 
put into question the alleged authentic indigeneity of the Mapuche.
A proportion of the Mapuche diaspora in Santiago have had to learn to live as outsid-
ers in both rural and urban worlds. They face pressure from the non-Indigenous urban 
society to hide their indigeneity and from the rural Mapuche society of origin who accuse 
them of a lack of authenticity. This has been the case of Valeria. Valeria was born in 
Santiago to Mapuche parents. Her experience as an urban leader has hinted at this ten-
sion in relation to what the Mapuche in Santiago are allowed to do and not to do in order 
to keep their membership of the ethnic group and association. In this respect Valeria 
points out:
I have been told that I am an awinkada. Other Mapuche have told me everything: that the 
Mapuche do not dye their hair, that I do not have a Mapuche face, that the Mapuche are not 
studious, that I do not do household chores and that is why my nails are polished. That is why 
it is important to self-identify and not to let others make the decision for you.
Identifying certain physical and behavioural traits that would not conform to the 
expected norm of a Mapuche woman, Valeria’s Mapuche peers have accused her of a 
lack of authenticity due to her supposed process of mimicking the ‘other’ Winka women. 
Both her transgressions in terms of physical complexion and personal presentation as 
well as her interests outside of what is expected from a ‘real’ Mapuche woman, have 
been arguments for Valeria to be labelled as awinkada. This situation has led her to 
Brablec 141
conclude that in certain Mapuche circles, to be accepted as a member of a Mapuche 
association, it is necessary to undergo a cultural folklorisation so as to distance oneself 
from the Winka. This tendency has been reflected in what I call an exaggeration of inter-
ethnic differences in which Indigenous people attribute pejorative characteristics to non-
Indigenous individuals as a way of separating themselves from these ‘others’ and by 
doing so, reinforce a sense of their own ethnicity. From the interior of the Mapuche 
associations themselves, essentialist positions have been developed with respect to the 
Mapuche identity. As indicated by Alvarado (2016), there has been a tendency to repro-
duce a biological culturalism based on innate characteristics that would make the 
Mapuche unique. In this sense, for Valeria, it is important to have a strong sense of self-
identification as Mapuche that would allow them to avoid calls for an anachronistic 
folklorisation in relation to what it means to be and behave as a Mapuche in Santiago.
Conclusions
Exploring how urban Indigenous individuals inhabit, negotiate and challenge definitions 
of Indigenous identity in cities is important as regimes of biological and cultural authen-
ticity continue to dictate policies and practices that regulate the everyday lives of 
Indigenous peoples around the world. Without the debates presented in this article, new 
ways of being Indigenous could be overshadowed. As discussed in this article, the re-
construction of Mapuche identity in Santiago is outlined by the assortment between 
those who have come to terms with their champurria identity and those who attempt to 
recover a supposedly Indigenous purity. Inevitably, however, the Mapuche in the city do 
not comply with all the ‘assumed givens’ of an ‘authentic’ Mapuche-ness as a result of 
their urban dwelling. Nonetheless, the Mapuche in Santiago still have the option to 
recover relevant cultural traits that may help them gain better social acceptance and thus 
distance themselves from awinkado conceptions. Because it is apprehended in a collec-
tive process of learning, culture is the stronghold of the process of ‘becoming’ more 
Mapuche and less awinkado in the city. As a result, urban Mapuche associations have 
made the recovery and implementation of cultural traits their main objective.
Since the recovery of democracy in Chile in the early 1990s, the Mapuche in Santiago 
have been actively engaged in an identity re-construction process in the urban milieu. 
Although they are heterogeneous groups, urban Mapuche associations have shared a 
desire to remember and enact practices identified as characteristic of an alleged common 
homeland, the Wallmapu, enabling new identification possibilities for their member-
ships. In their search for resources for the development of cultural activities, frequently 
in the form of language workshops, urban Mapuche associations have been engaged in 
an interactional process with the state. Consequently, the state has tended to condition its 
support upon fulfilment of a series of demands. As suggested by Richards (2004), the 
Chilean state tends to economically favour Indigenous claims based on cultural recogni-
tion in line with the ‘indio permitido’ criteria, while diverting attention from demands 
based on political recognition, which would result in a more radical redistribution of 
power and resources into Mapuche hands. With the purpose of establishing support ties 
with the state that would allow the carrying out of cultural activities, associations have 
tended to reinforce an essentialist array of cultural traits that appeal to a homeland-based 
142 Sociology 55(1)
ethnicity. Thus, some urban Mapuche associations have tended to use ‘strategic essen-
tialism’ to meet an ideal of ‘indio permitido’ set out by the state to qualify for the neces-
sary funds to support the re-creation of their culture. This, according to the Mapuche 
historian Sergio Caniuqueo (2019), has led the Mapuche to be transformed into a cultural 
community.
The Mapuche in Santiago constitute a powerful point of reference to consider the 
coexistence of heterogeneous elements that neither aspire to fuse with the identity of 
mainstream Chilean society nor want to produce a new identity category such as ‘urban 
Indigenous’ or ‘warriache’. However, ideas of racial and cultural purity have been gen-
erating fractures among urban associations leading, in turn, those non-participant 
Mapuche to feel a lack of representativeness. As a result, political articulation through 
mechanisms of representation that are legitimate for the Mapuche, that are agglutinating 
and that respect the diversity of visions, has been co-opted by private interests and nor-
mative discussions about cultural authenticity. Caniuqueo (2019) is right in this sense: 
the Mapuche are a modern society with some important sectors that are trapped in a 
discussion based on Indigenous authenticity. Although this debate helps to re-create an 
identity in opposition to other identities such as the Winka, it fractures the Mapuche cul-
tural identity by claiming the need to live according to imagined and idealised ethnic 
traits. Currently, by refraining from promoting over-romanticised ideas of Indigenous 
identity, Mapuche associations in Santiago constitute dormant sites of potential radical 
identity re-articulation.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or 
publication of this article: this work was supported by the University of Cambridge Sociology 
Graduate Education Committee (GEC) Fieldwork Funding; Newnham College, University of 
Cambridge Fieldwork Grant; and under the Programme Becas de Doctorado con Acuerdo Bilateral 
en el Extranjero Becas Chile-Cambridge (Grant Fondecyt: No. 84140015).
ORCID iD
Dana Brablec  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0816-5526
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Brablec 145
Dana Brablec holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral project 
looked at the collective identity re-creation practices developed by the Mapuche diaspora within 
Indigenous associations in Santiago de Chile and the role that the state played in this process. 
She now works as an Affiliated Researcher in Sociology and as a Teaching Associate in Latin 
American Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is currently researching issues around 
female Indigenous entrepreneurship in Latin American cities.
Date submitted May 2019
Date accepted February 2020