Indigenous Images of Democracy on City Streets: Native Representations in Contemporary Chilean Graffiti and Muralism

Abstract

This chapter will center on works by Chilean street artists who have turned to Andean native cultures as a source of decolonial visions. Their indigenous images in murals and graffiti have emerged as significant components of a larger project seeking to democratize public space. These native figures on street walls operate as powerful allegories of greater inclusion within democratic institutions. I will argue that these artists invoke the iconographies of pueblos originarios (“original peoples”) as a way to redefine not only their own identities but also that of the nation as a whole. Through their work, these artists recognize and celebrate the current and past challenges to colonization posed by native peoples of the Americas, casting them as models for resistance to the Chilean neoliberal state.

Introduction

An indigenous machi stands twenty feet tall as she meets the gaze of onlookers walking down Departamental Avenue, a busy thoroughfare in a working class neighborhood of Santiago, Chile . Female machis are traditional healers, spiritual leaders, and important political figures in Mapuche culture so her monumental presence in this location has radical and decolonial connotations. This machi on Departamental is the central figure depicted in a mural titled Meli Wuayra (“Four Winds”) (Fig. 1) painted by the Chilean graffiti crew known as Aislap. The mural is just one of thousands of community-driven and non-hegemonic street art projects that have materialized since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990. The advent of democracy coupled with Chile’s powerful history of public protest in urban spaces made the country into a haven for mural and graffiti artists seeking to promote alternative images that challenge state- and corporate-sponsored imagery. The wall paintings that adorn the Chilean urban landscape promote experiences, ideas, and aesthetics often marginalized or silenced in the country’s official history, such as Aislap’s celebration of female-centered Mapuche culture.

Fig. 1

Aislap, Meli Wuayra (2010), graffiti mural , Museo a Cielo Abierto San Miguel, Santiago

This chapter will center on works by Aislap and others in the current Chilean street art scene who have turned to Andean native cultures as a source of decolonial visions. Indigenous images in murals and graffiti have emerged as significant components of a larger project seeking to democratize public space . These native figures on street walls operate as powerful allegories of greater inclusion within democratic institutions. I will argue not only that these artists, most of whom can be identified as mestiz@s, invoke the iconographies of pueblos originarios (“original peoples”) as a way to redefine their own identities but also that of the nation a whole. Through their work, these artists recognize and celebrate the current and past challenges to colonization posed by native peoples of the Americas, casting them as models for resistance to the Chilean neoliberal state. Images of indigenous peoples and cultures for these artists allegorize a more democratic vision of the state. These artists understand, as Chilean indigenous scholars and activists also do, that “it is important to consider indigenous demands as part of the commitment to democratic reconstruction and to the restoration of essential rights” (Namuncura, 2014).

The Emergence of Street Art in Chile

Street art exploded in the country during the early 1990s, precisely after the nation returned to democratic rule. These public artworks included, but were not limited to, murals , graffiti, and wall paintings that combined the aesthetics and techniques of both muralism and graffiti.¹ Moreover, this wall imagery was created by both older and younger generations of street artists who could now work on city streets without the fear of being apprehended, tortured, and/or even killed. The exhilaration and euphoria that was first expressed in urban spaces after the end of the Pinochet regime provided a fertile atmosphere for the development of a radical and community-driven public art . This initial excitement was soon tempered by the realization that the legacy of the dictatorship would prevail for years to come and by the recognition that democracy had not been won as much as it had been negotiated with the members of the military government, including Pinochet himself, who managed to position himself as senator-for-life with full diplomatic immunity after stepping down from power . The street art movement, which included muralists and graffiter@s (graffiti artists,) soon turned a critical eye toward democratic processes that were underway in Chile, processes that reflected the nation’s longer history with repression, neocolonization, neoliberalism, and social hierarchies.

Indigenous Activism and Politics

Native people in Chile saw the opportunity for positive change with the end of the dictatorship . In the late 1980s representatives for the Mapuche, Aymara, and other first-nation groups met with members of the parties opposed to Pinochet to form an alliance. “Indigenous people, like thousands of Chileans,” Namuncura explained, “were also direct victims of the profound state-sponsored violence [of the dictatorship ]” (2014). As a result of this meeting they signed the Nueva Imperial Pact, which made it clear that the new democratic government would prioritize the rights of indigenous people in times of democracy. Though post-dictatorship governments took many steps forward as a result of these agreements, they also took an equal or greater number of steps backwards when it came to the implementation of pro-indigenous policies. Whenever these policies seemed to come up against other pieces of legislation that benefitted power structures such as private industry and corporations, the demands of first-nation populations were either put on the back burner or defeated altogether. Chilean native scholars and activists also point out that indigenous issues were dealt with in woefully reductive and myopic ways; for many politicians of the post-dictatorship, the problem with indigenous Chileans was merely an issue of poverty and lack of opportunities concentrated in the southern region of Araucania, nothing more (Namuncura, 2014).

Discourses about the importance of space and territory ran across indigenous demands for greater autonomy while also emerging prominently in the urban practices of street artists. Among the most contentious and polarizing issues Mapuche and other native groups in the country have raised is the recuperation of ancestral lands. The end of the dictatorship opened the door for national conversations about what constituted indigenous lands and why these were important for native people’s true citizenship. These conversations were seriously compromised, however, when, in 2004, Endesa Chile , a private company, built the Ralco Hydroelectric Plant on ancestral lands of the Bío Bío Region. The government’s decision to allow the plant’s construction was a bitter reminder of the prolonged colonial legacy of subordination practiced in Chile (Namuncura, 2014). Space, place, and territory have thus become both physical and discursive sites of indigenous resistance. For the street artists who became conscious of the plight of the pueblos originarios in their country, the liberation of space became broadly symptomatic and indirectly symbolic of the need for recuperation of territory among Chile’s most disenfranchised communities, including its first-nation populations.

The murals and graffiti works depicting indigenous imagery also function as counter discourses to those often presented by the Chilean media and by conservative politicians. The demands for greater justice and inclusion on the part of Mapuche activists, for example, have been cast as criminal and terrorist acts through the application of the Anti-Terrorist Law originally created under Pinochet’s regime. This law imposes harsher penalties for actions deemed to be terrorist in nature and Mapuche demonstrators from the southern territories of the country have been charged with these “crimes” at disproportionally higher rates. Though the Chilean government has made attempts to modify or “soften” this legislation, Mapuche activist and lawyer Lautaro Loncon Antileo has argued that these initiatives are utterly inadequate: “[…] just like Pinochet’s Constitution [of 1980], the problem rests with [the law’s] essence; it is its architecture that contains repressive elements that go beyond what is lawfully permitted” (2014). News outlets and media pundits have also contributed to the criminalization of Mapuche activism, as Namuncura observes:

[…] the conservative press constructed a very hegemonic communication strategy to convince the country and the state that they were facing a terrorist escalation of a major magnitude, that the peace in the south was compromised and that their investments would emigrate outside of Chile with grave consequences to the national GDP and to employment.²

We can regard the indigenous imagery created by Chilean street artists as an alternative or even antidote to the neocolonial and neoliberal rhetoric of the press. These artists legitimize the grievances of indigenous people in Chile while proclaiming their right to greater sovereignty and democratic inclusion.

While space and territory have been central to the political demands by first-nation communities, education has also been critically important to Mapuche activists in Chile . They not only call for greater access to educational opportunities for indigenous children and young adults, but they also argue in favor of a school curriculum that includes the cultural, historical, and social contributions they have made to Chile’s national identity. “Chilean society holds great ignorance about indigenous history, culture and ancestral knowledges, denying its own roots,” indigenous writer María Hueichaqueo Epulef stated, “[which is] something that affects its capacity to comprehend historic demands” (2014). For many indigenous Chileans, changes in policy and legislation need to come hand in hand with changes in social attitudes given that, in the words of native scholar Elisa Loncon, “the culture of domination and contempt toward original peoples has not changed” (2014). Loncon further contends that young people in Chile need to know that there are different languages , cultures, and worldviews in Chile , as the school system in the country often promotes the idea of a culturally homogeneous nation with a predominantly European heritage.

Loncon (2014) proposes the model of interculturality, which some educators use for second language instruction. When communicating in the target language , learners are required to understand the culture of the new language they are acquiring, not just its grammar, pronunciation, syntax, etc. It asks students to place themselves in the space and subjectivity of the other because all knowledge is situated within a cultural context. Interculturality thus encourages experiential and relational forms of learning. I argue that Chilean street artists enact a form of interculturality that uses visual rather than spoken or written language . The murals and graffiti pieces they create operate as learning exercises for them to acquire indigenous cultural knowledge. In the process of adopting this knowledge, they, as non-indigenous people, attempt to situate themselves in the position of indigenous Chileans, to relate to the experience of prolonged colonization and marginalization that they have endured. They have taken to heart the call by indigenous scholars, writers, and activists who demand that non-indigenous Chileans learn about the pueblos originarios who first inhabited Chile . In turn, street artists have capitalized on their presence in the public sphere and on their skills to create monumental imagery that compels their audiences to confront the indigenous experience, which has been silenced and rendered invisible by public education. Moreover, as mestiz@s they are patently aware that being indigenous is also part of who they are.

The Unstable Reception of Indigenous Imagery

Having laid out some basic tenets behind indigenous activism and street art praxis in Chile , I will now turn to discussions and analyses of the work by a small but representative selection of Chilean street artists who have deployed indigenous iconography as a means of disseminating knowledge about native peoples to a wide population that does not have much knowledge about native culture. This work mirrors many of the decolonial practices enacted and promoted by indigenous activists who insist on a democratic society that prioritizes its pueblos originarios. The analyses and interpretations of the visual imagery I introduce here are my own to be sure. They do not necessarily reflect the perceptions and receptions of such works by the various individuals who see them on a daily basis. Nevertheless, as part of the Chilean diaspora living in the USA and as a former urban dweller of those spaces myself, I am pointing to some potential readings and interpretations that passersby may perceive from such imagery just because I am familiar with the social context of Chilean contemporary society. Moreover, these analyses also partly reflect some of the artists’ own intentions behind the creation of their graffiti murals . The reactions and interpretations of passersby are undoubtedly unstable, unpredictable, and not fully knowable, but I would argue that it would be difficult for viewers to regard this work as something other than wall paintings that seek to celebrate, promote, and uphold indigenous knowledge and worldviews. Thus, my analyses suggest possible meanings and interpretations attached to the native bodies rendered by Chilean street artists.

Indigenous Iconographies: Meli Wuayra

Important figures in the Chilean street art scene, the graffiti/mural crew Aislap, discussed in the introduction to this essay, is composed of Juan Moraga and Pablo Aravena, who began painting and tagging the streets of Santiago in 2001. They were heavily influenced by Mexican muralism, the global graffiti scene, and the emergence of muralist brigades in Chile starting in the 1960s.³ One of their concerns as public artists is to develop imagery that can be easily read by spectators who are on the move, whether they are walking by on foot or using public transport. “The street mural is in the large avenues,” Aravena explains, “so people can be on the move and still see it. It is vision in movement” (Arte Contemporáneo Chileno—AISLAP). For these reasons, Aislap opts for large and bold imagery that can be understood and absorbed in just a few seconds. Moreover, the deployment of indigenous imagery in their work is a characteristic element of their aesthetic , making their work easily recognizable among other street artists and graffiti connoisseurs in Chile .

In 2010, the duo participated in a major mural and graffiti initiative called Museo a Cielo Abierto, San Miguel (Open-Sky Museum, San Miguel.) This initiative, coordinated by community organizers Roberto Hernández and David Villarroel, consisted of a series of murals painted on apartment buildings belonging to a low-income housing project. Aislap’s contribution to this museo was the aforementioned graffiti mural , Meli Wuayra (2010), which promoted the greater recognition and legitimization of Chile’s first nations. Using a symmetrical and geometric composition, the artists placed the monumental figure of a Mapuche machi at the very center of the mural . In Mapuche culture, machis are traditional healers who possess great wisdom and knowledge about spirituality, medicine, and society. Though both men and women can fulfill this role in Mapuche society, female machis are more common. The figure of the machi in the Chilean national imaginary, however, represents a contested terrain. Anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (2007) indicated that machis and Mapuche culture in general have been utilized by the state to promote a non-threatening and hegemonic image of national identity. On August 5, 1999, for example, Chilean president Eduardo Frei participated in a televised Mapuche ceremony featuring Machi María Ángela in which he vowed to create a more egalitarian society for indigenous people in the country. In spite of his seeming gesture of legitimization, his government and the one of Ricardo Lagos who succeeded him, as Bacigalupo explained, “built a series of hydroelectric plants along the Bio-Bío River in the Mapuche-Pewenche communities and a highway that ran through other Mapuche communities” while also making use of draconian legislation to suppress resistance to these actions.

The machi’s role as healer is significant in Meli Wuayra, for the practice stands as a metaphor for the process of renewal after the urban neglect that was happening in the Población San Miguel where this graffiti mural is located. The organizers of the mural project were seeking to use muralism and graffiti as a means to fighting the deteriorated state of the Población San Miguel by the turn of the millennium. The organizers and the participating artists of the public arts initiative saw the need for a collective process of healing after many years of substandard living conditions.⁴ For the Mapuche, healing involves “physical, spiritual, and emotional balance as well as good social relationships” (2007). Bacigalupo (2007) has indicated that much of contemporary Mapuche healing and spiritual practices “is tied closely to the history of Spanish colonialism , missionizing by Catholic priests, resistance to Chilean national projects of assimilation and development, and Mapuche people’s incorporation and resignification of Chilean majority discourses.” The existence of evil spirits, for instance, is often equated with the negative results of colonization,⁵ effects that have endured even after the end of the dictatorship as Mapuche land continues to be threatened by the construction of freeways, dams, and other modernization projects. Thus, processes of healing assisted by machis are often interwoven with direct or indirect strategies of decolonization and resistance. The emancipatory forms of healing connected to these indigenous practices is then highlighted in this mural by Aislap where the machi is clearly shown within her role as healer and sage. The artists depict her wearing her traditional attire adorned by characteristic Mapuche jewelry such as the trarilonco (headpiece) and the trapelacucha (pectoral adornment.) In her hand she holds a potted flower, a reference to the machi’s use of herbs and plants for medicinal purposes. Surrounding her hands is a circular motif that resembles a kultrun, the sacred drum played by machis.

The healing powers of the machi in this mural have a powerful effect in the specific locale of the Población San Miguel. Knowing that the healing process is not only individual, but also communal, Aislap put the powers of the machi at the service of the residents of the población who have likely shared struggles and hardships in common with the larger Mapuche population. Hers is a healing gesture that is cognizant of the injustices that cause social, physical, and spiritual ailments. The pictorial space representing indigenous worldviews creates a challenge or, at the very least, an alternative view to the neoliberal and colonial distribution of urban space . The spiritual and physical realms depicted in Meli Wuayra provide a window into an organization of the world that is quite distinct from the hierarchical and segregationist distribution of urban space that state and corporate institutions devise.

Aislap in Meli Wuayra extend their representation of indigenous cultures to other first-nation people in Chile . In the upper registers of the mural we see figures that correspond to the Aymara populations—originally from the northern Altiplano region of Chile , Peru, and Bolivia—and the Selk’nam people who once populated the Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina before disappearing by the 1970s and 1980s (Chapman, 1982).⁶ The choice of these two figures was neither coincidental nor random. The Aymaras have a powerful history of resistance and political activism , in particular in Bolivia, where they have been instrumental in organizing the coca farmers’ movement, which helped to elect the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, who is of Aymara descent. Juxtaposing a native population that has been virtually eradicated with one that is hyper-visible in decolonial struggles over self-determination gave the residents of the Población San Miguel two polar extremes of the possible effects of colonialism , capitalism, and neoliberalism on native populations. Nevertheless, both figures are afforded the same importance in the mural .

In the lower register of Meli Wuayra, Aislap complemented the presence of the machi, the Selk’nam and the Aymara with figures representing the Polynesian Island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), embodied here by the iconic moai sculptures that allegorized deified ancestors for the native people there. Also inhabiting this lower register is an enigmatic male figure that the artists themselves described as “an emerging man from the digital era” (Centro Cultural Mixart, 2010). The inclusion of this “digital man” may seem anachronistic in a mural about native people of Chile yet his presence is nevertheless quite relevant here. Though indigenous people in Chile have had lesser access to digital tools, their worldviews and spiritual knowledge are equated to the power of the digital sphere in this mural . So the tools of the indigenous depicted in this mural —the kultrun, the potted flower, the body paint, the moais—are technologies, too, in some ways not unlike high-speed computers, smartphones, fiber-optic cable, and the like. Both seek enhanced access to knowledge and communication . The fact that the “digital man” is squarely situated within an indigenous realm signifies not only a legitimization of indigenous technologies, but also a leveling effect between digital/science-based and spiritual ways of knowing.

Indigenous Iconographies: Gigi’s Luisas

Indigenous imagery for Chilean street artists has become a source of decolonial and democratic world views that not only critically address issues of race and class in the country’s post-dictatorship era, but also point to greater gender inclusion within the nation’s power systems. Graffitera Gigi (Marjorie Peñailillo), who has been active in the seaside cities of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, is interested in the bodies of women as important sites of feminist agency and empowerment, taking cues from indigenous cultures for her re-thinking on Chilean patriarchal culture . The representation of female figures in her graffiti murals directly referred to her call for women to play active roles in urban spaces . Gigi often turns to pre-conquest Andean imagery as inspiration for much of the female-centered iconography of her graffiti murals . She has long been fascinated with the Pre-Columbian artistic traditions from the Valdivia (Ecuador) and Moche (Peru) cultures. This fascination also included the syncretic traditions of spiritual festivals such as La Tirana from Chile and Oruro from Bolivia.

Part of the artist’s signature style included a recurring graffiti character she called Luisa (Fig. 2). Gigi often rendered Luisa’s body in the nude using warm colors, such as reds, oranges, and yellows. With her rather stubby proportions her body did not conform to patriarchal notions of feminine beauty, yet the various poses, postures, and attitudes she adopted in Gigi’s pieces exuded a sense of self-confidence and even defiance. “Luisa is a multicultural mix, that is born out of [my] contact with the indigenous cultures from Brazil , Peru, and Bolivia,” Gigi explained (Peñailillo Endre, 2010). The vivid coloring of the Luisas reflected the similarly vibrant aesthetics of the of Oruro and La Tirana, while these figures’ stocky and ample bodies are meant to, as Gigi herself articulates, “cite the obesity of the Pre-Columbian Venuses from the Andean plateau” (Peñailillo Endre, 2010). The Luisas’ larger body size were not a detriment to their power , but rather a necessary component of their creative energy . The artist insisted that these monumental women epitomized important concepts from Pre-Columbian worldviews such as “nudity, fertility, religiosity, identity and strength” (Peñailillo Endre, 2010).

Fig. 2

Gigi (Marjorie Peñailillo), Untitled (2011), graffiti mural , Valparaiso, Chile

While Luisa has made numerous appearances in the urban sphere, Gigi has also placed her in strategic spots throughout the natural topography around the Valparaiso area. In Luisa Playera [Beach Luisa] (2013) and Luisa del Bosque [Luisa of the Forest] (2012) (Figs. 3 and 4) we saw this figure presiding over local landscapes of the region. Luisa’s rather whimsical nude presence on the beach and the forest here likened her to an ocean and/or earth goddess. Gigi’s use of the surroundings cleverly informed our readings of the Luisas who seem to be situated within their proper element. Painted on an abandoned building next to a small forest, Luisa del Bosque reclined is an almost pastoral fashion as she blew bubbles from a heart-shaped rim. Luisa de la Playa, for her part, leaned back as she took in the sun and ocean breeze around her. Both figures recalled indigenous nature goddesses whose powers were closely connected to the natural world.

Fig. 3

Gigi (Marjorie Peñailillo), Luisa Playera (2013), graffiti mural , El Tabo, Valparaiso, Chile

Fig. 4

Gigi (Marjorie Peñailillo), Luisa del Bosque (2012), graffiti mural , Villa Alemana, Chile

Gigi’s interest in Andean goddess figures represented both a continuation and a break with certain artistic traditions. Women artists in the Americas have long embraced ancient and pre-colonial goddess figures in their work. Feminist artists in the USA and Europe during the 1970s, for instance, sought to celebrate women’s empowerment by citing female deities in their visual vocabulary. Around the same period Chicana artists throughout the Southwestern United States celebrated the importance to Aztec goddesses like Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui with their work. Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, for her part, made powerful allusions to Taino deities Guanaroca and Iyaré with her earthworks. In Latin America, famed Mexican painter Frida Kahlo paid homage to Tlazolteotl, Aztec goddess of filth and fertility, in her painting My Birth from 1932, while Peruvian artist Tilsa Tsuchiya, active mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, did a series of paintings depicting mythical women inspired by Andean indigenous cosmology. While feminists have long dismissed this “goddess worship” as essentialist, reductive, and overly idealized, such a phenomenon reflected a desire to seek non-patriarchal forms of spirituality and creative expression on the part of feminist artists and cultural producers.⁷ For Latin American and US Latina artists in particular, their heightened consciousness about the colonial history of the Americas and the imposition of patriarchal social systems ushered in by the conquest made their interest in indigenous and, in some cases, African-descent spiritualities all the more subversive. Gigi’s updating of the Pre-Columbian goddess through the aesthetics of graffiti and Chilean street art made her Luisa figure more than a mere of artifact from an imagined genderless utopia. Instead, this female-centered iconography was made relevant and pertinent to the twenty-first century realities of women who lay claims to the Chilean urban sphere.

Indigenous Iconographies: Inti’s Ekeko and Ekeka

Like Gigi, Valparaiso-born Chilean graffitero Inti also taps into the decolonizing and democratizing potential of Andean cultural traditions. Lauded as perhaps the most successful, well-respected, and visible Chilean street artist of his time, Inti has painted in various parts of the world and currently resides in Paris. He has proudly proclaimed that his family raised him with an admiration and respect for pueblos originarios in Latin America, understanding that as a mestizo he is the hybrid progeny of transatlantic and transpacific colonial contacts. Inti’s graffiti murals in Chile and elsewhere often focus on mystical, enigmatic, and seer-like figures who appear to hold unique spiritual knowledge about our universe.

In November of 2012, Inti took part in “Hecho en Casa” (“Made at Home”), the first festival of urban intervention taking place in Santiago sponsored by the city of Santiago, the Ministry of Tourism, and the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center (better known as the GAM). This initiative sought to promote local artistic talent by encouraging various types of cultural practitioners to engage the public sphere with their work. Inti’s contribution to this festival consisted of untitled “twin” graffiti murals located immediately outside of the subway exit for the Bellas Artes station (Fig. 5). The visual effect of these wall pieces is quite striking; as passersby ascend the stairs of this underground subway station, they find themselves almost enveloped by Inti’s distinct imagery. The location was a significant one as it is in the middle of a bustling art, restaurant, and café scene in Santiago thus encompassing the intersection between commerce, leisure, art, and tourism.

Fig. 5

Inti, untitled graffiti mural (“Ekeko”) (2012), Bellas Artes, Santiago

For his two murals in Bellas Artes, Inti drew inspiration from his travels to Bolivia and contact with Aymara populations. “When I see Bolivian [indigenous] communities doing marvelous, creative, never monotonous and dynamic work with an incredible technique,” the artist has explained, “I say those are the real artists and they are not part of the arts circuit.”⁸ Painted over two very large walls that are situated perpendicularly to one another, the artist here deployed the enigmatic figure of Ekeko on both surfaces. Often referred to as the Aymara demigod of abundance and good fortune, Ekeko has Pre-Columbian roots in the Andean region. According to Federico Arnillas (1996), this deity was originally depicted as an “anthropomorphic and hunchbacked figure with a prominent virile member, linked to abundance and fertility.” These figures—often sold in the Fiesta de la Alasita (literally “buy me” in Aymara)—are commonly depicted with numerous objects and commodities attached to his body such as money, food, cigarettes, musical instruments, and others. The symbolism and postcolonial significance of Ekeko was not lost on Inti who mined the multiple meanings of this demigod in Bellas Artes:

I came to the idea of doing Ekeko in relation to the theme of desires. All of Chile was beginning to move according to their desires, to ask for what was basic and necessary such as education, health and all those things. That is what Ekeko symbolizes to me. It is not the person who wants things just for the sake of it but it is person who demands basic needs.⁹

These double murals Inti created in Bellas Artes are composed of two large figures that take up most of the walls’ pictorial space, namely a male Ekeko and a female Ekeka. The two figures are similar in terms of size and pose, making clear that these characters are complimentary doubles of one another. The artist borrowed the iconography from traditional representations of Ekeko and depicted them with various objects attached to their bodies.

The male Ekeko sports a taupe winter coat and matching bowler hat placed on top of a knit chullo cap, a common attire of Aymara populations from the Andean Plateau. His face is covered with a bandana of sorts embossed with the Chilean flag. This bandana codes him as a radical revolutionary as these face coverings are common among street protesters throughout Latin America, including Chile . The objects appended to his body represent his desire not for wealth and fortune, but rather for greater access to artifacts that can enhance the quality of his life and that of others. Among the many objects appended to his body, we find an open book, a reference to this Ekeko’s demand for an education, an issue that resonates with many Chileans who had witnessed the mass student and teacher political mobilizations of the last decade. The pan flute he also sports is a traditional Andean instrument that speaks of indigenous peoples’ important contributions to the musical traditions in the region. In his left hand he holds a smartphone, demonstrating at the same time that he commands twenty-first century media technologies thus undercutting the notion that indigenous people are inherently “primitive” and “naturally” disinclined toward the tools of the digital, as Chilean indigenous activist and writer María Francisca Collipal Huanqui (2014) articulates: “In many cases, indigenous people are considered to be in permanent opposition to what the rest of the [Chilean] population regards as the correct path toward development, without being able to distinguish the difference [between modernity and tradition.]” But Ekeko here also has access to non-manufactured and traditional objects. He carries a bag of yellow and blue maize, as well as a large jug of chicha, a fermented corn alcoholic drink consumed in South America and parts of Central America. Clearly, his technology savvy does not preclude his access to the natural world and the riches of the earth. While many of the objects attached to his body are broadly Andean in origin, the flag covering his face connect him more specifically to Chile . Moreover, the pick axe on his back and the bag of copper nuggets under his right arm, communicates to the spectator that Ekeko mines Chile’s principal national mineral.

The adjacent or “twin” mural Inti created in Bellas Artes represents the female counterpart to the male figure, namely Ekeka. The equivalent size and visibility of this figure underscores the equal standing and importance this figure holds vis à vis the male Ekeko. Though this demigod of good fortune and abundance is almost exclusively represented as a man, in the most normative sense of the word, Inti found that in the course of his research feminist activists in Bolivia had devised Ekeka as a way to challenge the male-centeredness of contemporary Aymara ritual and cultural practices:

Why is it always men? I began to do research and it turns out that the [female] Ekeka already existed. She was created about 4–5 years ago by a women’s collective in Bolivia who are quite the warriors. Their name is Mujeres Creando [Women Creating]. They are cholitas [Aymara women] and very creative. They are doing their feminist movement to change Bolivian society. They had already created this woman, Ekeka.¹⁰

Mujeres Creando was formed in the 1980s by Bolivian activists María Galindo and Julieta Paredes. The group emerged as a result of the growing disdain for the inherent machismo, racism , colonialism , neoliberalism, and heteronormativity of the political right and left in Bolivia (García-Pabón, 2003). Though the group is led primarily by middle-class mestizas in Bolivia, their vision of oppression and equality is an intersectional one that pays close attention to the multiple forms marginalization endured by indigenous women who are also active in the group. Another characteristic of Mujeres Creando is their use of creative expression in public spaces , including theatrical performance and graffiti tagging (García-Pabón, 2003). The group created Ekeka to challenge the notion that Ekeko is, in Raykha Flores Cossío words, “a father provider” (2013). In workshops the group carried out in 2009 and 2012, the collective worked with artists, college students, and victims of domestic violence to re-imagine this figure using clay, paint, and an unapologetically feminist lens.

While Inti’s Ekeka in Bellas Artes does not look much like the figures authored by Mujeres Creando, he does replicate some of the feminist impetus and ethos behind them. In this graffiti mural , she is clearly Ekeko’s equal in all respects, including in the revolutionary and rebellious aspects. She wears a red shawl with a small bowler hat; her vibrant red hair is styled in a pair of loose braids. A box chest appears to float in front of her prompting viewers to wonder what kinds of treasures, secrets, and wonders might be inside. We can’t possibly know, but what we can determine is that she has access to these mysteries as she holds the key to this box on her right hand. Other similarly enigmatic objects are attached to her torso, namely a television set, an apple, a sheep, paper money, and a charango, a ukulele-type instrument commonly used among Inca and Aymara populations. All these elements straddle the fine line between different realms of women’s lives, especially for those women who deploy various forms of creativity, resourcefulness, intelligence, and spiritual resilience to meet all the demands and expectations placed upon them. For indigenous women in particular—be they Aymara, Mapuche, or otherwise—these demands and expectations occur at the same time that they endure racialized and gendered forms of invisibility, denigration, and subordination. Through the enormous scale of Inti’s mural , Ekeka here demands visibility and recognition. Moreover, by the mere fact that a feminist Bolivian image is situated on Chilean soil, Inti is making a powerful transnational statement about women’s rights, a timely one in Chile where pay inequality, domestic violence, and limitations on reproductive rights are unfortunate realities in spite of the two-term presidency of Michelle Bachelet, South America’s first woman president.

The revolutionary iconography with which Inti endows Ekeko is also present in Ekeka’s side of this double mural . Though she is represented in a mothering role, as made evident by the two children she carries on her back, she also sports a bandolier or bullet belt across her chest that alludes to her feminist warrior status. The mother/feminist role of this Ekeka may seem contradictory, as Jocelyn Fenton Stitt and Pegeen Reichert Powell (2010) explain: “Feminism’s difficulty reconciling the practice of mothering with the politics of women’s liberation is a complex issue.” Moreover, this image actively challenges the notion that indigenous women are, in the words of Margaret Jacobs (2009), “deficient mothers and homemakers” who are “the degraded chattel of their men who failed to measure up to white, middle-class, Christian ideals […]” Rachel Hullum-Montes (2012) has observed that Latin America has a long history of indigenous women mobilizing “around their identities as mothers and caregivers” whereby their activism becomes a way for them to care for “both their families and the indigenous community.” Hullum-Montes further explains that “motherist politics” has been an important means by which women have entered into social movements and political activism in the continent.¹¹ Thus, Ekeka here embodies the convergence between indigenous mothering and decolonial activism .

Conclusion

The deployment of indigenous iconography by the likes of Aislap, Gigi, and Inti provides us with a powerful means of communicating to the Chilean public that indigenous people deserve greater visibility in public discourses. This visibility , however, sharply contrasts with more common depictions in the media of native peoples as terrorists, domestic workers, and/or “primitive” and undesirable sectors of Chilean society. Though it is difficult to fully ascertain what effect these wall images have on the individuals who see them on the street, their effectiveness can be assessed by the nature of the iconography itself and by the ways in which these graffiti murals transform the space where they are located. These are images that depict indigenous people in complex, humane, non-objectifying, and culturally specific ways, even when the artists take artistic license with their representation. These alternative visions are then coupled with the radical intervention they make into the space where their work is located. Without Aislap’s Meli Wuayra (and other murals in that locale), the Población San Miguel would be just another drab and marginalized housing project that more affluent Chileans would avoid. Without Gigi’s Luisas in the beaches and forests around Valparaiso and Viña del Mar, these locales would just be places of leisure without the playfulness and pro-woman messages that these figures embody. Without Inti’s Ekeka and Ekeko, the area around the Bellas Artes subway station would just be a space that caters to tourists, restaurant goers, and commuters. These spaces come to life as a result of this powerful imagery and they do so because these artists tap into decolonial indigenous knowledge to make meaningful interventions into the public sphere. As such, city streets thus become a spaces where people can reflect on the country’s indigenous past and present. These artists thus provide us with meaningful ways to introduce national dialogues about indigeneity to the Chilean public, ones that are often ignored by the nation-state.

In sum, the presence of indigenous iconography in Chile’s city streets signals a liberation of public space , one that is enacted by a generation of artists who came of age after the official end of a long era of overt repression and who were and continue to be hungry for egalitarian visions for a better world. What street artists and indigenous activists alike underscore in different ways is the precariousness of democratic social practices not only in Chile , but in the Americas as a whole. After more than five centuries since the initial phases of the conquest, native populations are still actively engaged in decolonial projects with the purposes of transforming the social hierarchies that prevail in their ancestral lands and sacred territories. Thus, the public artists discussed in this essay aspire to place the worldviews and cosmovisions of the Mapuche, Aymara, Selk’nam, Diaguitas, Rapa Nui, and other first nations at the center of public dialogues about national identity and belonging.