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Mapuche youth between exclusion andthe future: protest, civic society andparticipation in ChileSarah Radcliffea & Andrew Webbb

a Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, DowningPlace, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UKb Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,Santiago, ChilePublished online: 27 Nov 2014.

To cite this article: Sarah Radcliffe & Andrew Webb (2014): Mapuche youth between exclusionand the future: protest, civic society and participation in Chile, Children's Geographies, DOI:10.1080/14733285.2014.964667

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Mapuche youth between exclusion and the future: protest, civic society andparticipation in Chile

Sarah Radcliffea* and Andrew Webbb

aDepartment of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3EN, UK; bInstitutode Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand,parental aspirations and neo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective andsocial ties to a racialized and often stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. Thepaper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture [Johnson-Hanks, J. 2002. “On the Limits ofLife Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures.” AmericanAnthropologist 104 (3): 865–880] to explore the contradictions facing youth in transitions toadulthood [Jeffrey, C. 2010. “Geographies of children and youth I: eroding maps of Life.”Progress in Human Geography 34 (4): 496–505.] and to consider the spatial–territorialdynamics through which these contractions are expressed [Smith, S. H. 2012. “‘In theHeart, There’s Nothing’: Unruly Youth, Generational Vertigo and Territory.” Transactions ofthe IBG 38 (4): 572–585]. The paper explores young indigenous rural secondary students’understandings of their life trajectories and socio-political conjunctures. The paper showsthat although indigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding theirfutures [cf. Kraftl, P. 2008. “Young People, Hope and Childhood-Hope.” Space and Culture11 (2): 81–92], these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racialexclusions, and the emotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties toindigenous communities and family members. Drawing on one year’s in-depth qualitativeresearch, the paper outlines the beliefs, practices and identities of rural Mapuche youthsubjects caught between parents’ experiences, and the Chile they want to inhabit with jobs,status and opportunity. The paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singular moments ofmodern historical ‘events’, as they have tended to be construed in the previous literature.Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least incontexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs.

Keywords: Latin America; politics; education; youth activism; vital conjuncture; neo-liberalmulticulturalism

1. Introduction

Mapuche teenagers are caught in a deadlock between, on the one hand, parental aspirations andneo-liberal educational processes, and on the other, affective and social ties to a racialized andoften stigmatized indigenous population and landscapes. Contributing to debates concerningthe civic and educational contexts through which young peoples’ aspirations and political contestsare moulded and reworked (following Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011), the paperexplores young peoples’ expressions of the everyday meanings and practices through whichthey come to understand their options for the future, and their racial, national and citizenship

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

*Corresponding author. Email: sar23@cam.ac.uk

Children’s Geographies, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2014.964667

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identifications. The paper draws on the concept of vital conjuncture (Johnson-Hanks 2002) toexplore the contradictions facing youth in transitions to adulthood (Jeffrey 2010), and to considerthe spatial–territorial dynamics through which these contradictions are expressed (Smith 2012).Through a close examination of racialized young people’s experience in contemporary Chile,the paper argues that in postcolonial settings, youth geographies need to examine the ways inwhich racial hierarchies contribute to shaping the implications of neo-liberal processes (includingthose impacting upon schooling, and territorial ties), and young peoples’ affective and emotionalpositionings (Holloway, Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011, 4). The paper shows that althoughindigenous young people express aspirations and even hope regarding their futures (cf. Kraftl2008), these expressions are best analysed in the context of ongoing racial exclusions, and theemotionally freighted situation this places them in regarding ties to indigenous communitiesand family members.

In the Chilean case, this framework permits the analysis of the factors contributing to racializedyouth’s conformism to or political alienation from, and action against, dominant society. In recentyears, Mapuche activism against the Chilean state is associated with youth political mobilisation, aswell as the literal and discursive criminalization of indigenous teenagers and young adults. Greatereducational opportunities for this generation of Mapuche (in comparison with previous gener-ations) coincide with the heightening of ethnic conflict, making, young people ‘simultaneously… policy objects or political “becomings” whose matters are largely managed by their adultsocieties’ (Kallio and Häkli 2013, 4). Young people are hence positioned at a vital conjuncturebetween becoming what dominant society labels ‘vanguards of social policy or vandals’ (Arnotand Swartz 2012, 5; also Ruddick 2003; Staeheli, Attoh, and Mitchell 2013; Mitchell 2014).

Shifts in Chilean society and Mapuche positionality hence speak to a conjuncture, ‘a sociallystructured zone of possibility that emerges around specific periods of potential transformation in alife or lives’ (Johnson-Hanks 2002, 871). Conjunctures mark decisive moments in which thefutures of young people are uncertain and open to negotiation, and hence refer to the ‘intersectionof structured expectations with uncertain futures’ where multiple outcomes occur over differenttimeframes (Johnson-Hanks 2002). At particular moments, conjunctures comprise periods‘when more than usual is in play … ., when the futures at stake are significant’ (Johnson-Hanks 2002, 871). Although institutions such as schools, military service and employmentoften represent the authorized institutional contexts for subject formation, young people arealso critically aware of wider social milieux and hence not passive vessels for induction and for-mation (Kennelly and Dillabough 2008; Wood 2014; Kallio and Häkli 2013). We take conjunc-ture to refer to a structured but not closed historic and spatially situated disposition of diversesubjects whose generational, institutional and civil society positionalities comprise an arenawithin which young people forge a characteristic type of citizenship, belonging and civilsociety. A conjuncture represents a ‘zone of possibility’ where individuals re-situate themselvesin relation to family, community, schooling, the state, and the political and civic landscape.

Rural Mapuche teenagers in provincial peri-urban boarding schools search for meaningfulconstructs of civic participation in everyday lived experiences emerging through geographicaland social marginalization founded on conquest and denigration. Marginalized indigenousyouth frequently express variable degrees of ambivalence and scepticism towards the aspirationsmapped out for them by neo-liberal educational policy and establishments. Hence, while we agreethat critical attention to youth hopefulness requires engagement with everyday expressions andunderstandings (Kraftl 2008), we argue that among racialized youth in fractured postcolonialsocieties, young people construct their visions for the future with reference to their relationalcivic standing and constrained prospects for ‘full’ citizenship. In Chile, the term Chilean refersto racially unmarked subjects (whose claims on citizenship are unquestioned), whereas (self-)identification as indigenous – through surname, language, location and bodily inscriptions – is

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a racialized binary category with problematic citizenship status. In a context where shifting policyand political friction induce aspirations among Mapuche young people to accede to an unmarkedstatus, this creates vital conjunctures of affective and political import.

Exploring young indigenous rural secondary students’ expressions of their life trajectories andsocio-political conjunctures through youth geographies and sociologies, the paper demonstratesthe largely conformist and tentatively political positionalities adopted by Mapuche teenagers inChile’s Araucanía region. Recently, children and youth research has increasingly recognizedthe heterogeneous trajectories towards adulthood undertaken by young people (Wyn andDwyer 1999; Thomson et al. 2002; Harris, Wyn, and Younes 2010). In part, these heterogeneoustrajectories arise from historically specific secular shifts in education, employment and mobility,such that today’s youth pathways often differ from previous generations, owing to socio-struc-tural, economic and demographic changes in institutions, political rights and civic cultures of par-ticipation and attitudes (Punch 2002; Katz 2004; Briones 2007; Furlong and Cartmel 2007;Jeffrey 2012; De los Angeles, Rizzini, and Del Rio 2013). Additionally, however, heterogeneoustransitions are increasingly recognised to be located historically and geographically, where powerrelations, formal politics and the non-commensurability of adult and youth positionalities consti-tute childhood and youth in relation to specific geographies of place and connection (e.g. Mitchell2003; Ruddick 2003; Jeffrey 2012; Kallio and Häkli 2013; Skelton 2013). Geography highlightsthe mutual constitution of society and space, and hence conjunctures are also centrally about theimagined and material geographies and landscapes through which young people self-identify associal actors and citizens-to-be. Building on Sara H. Smith’s account of young people in Ladakh,our analysis of the Mapuche case pays attention to territory and relations with the land in ‘a vitalterritorial conjuncture’ (Smith 2012, 573), because territorialising processes occur across scalesfrom the body, to region and nation and beyond. Analytically framing rural Mapuche youth’s con-junctures in this way elucidates how they construct themselves in relation to Mapuche politicalclaims for land and territorial autonomy, (dis)identifications with institutions and places acrossscales, and their understandings of Mapuche histories under colonial and republic rule. Finally,heterogeneous transitions arise from young people’s responses and agency regarding eventsaround them. During rapid socio-economic change, young people forge a specific repertoire ofactions, visions of the future and sense of urgency (Jeffrey 2010), and hence their viewpointsprovide key insights into these dynamics.

1.1. Research context and methods

Drawing on qualitative research with a total of 103 Mapuche secondary pupils aged 13–18 years,we argue the current generation of rural Mapuche secondary pupils attending weekly boardingschools in the Araucanía region, southern Chile are situated at a specific conjuncture. Chile’s indi-genous populations make up 4.6% of national totals (80% comprise diverse and heterogeneousMapuche populations).1 These Mapuche teenagers – who comprise around 70% of many ruralschool intakes – are becoming citizens when indigenous activism is increasingly represented inpublic discourse as criminal, and seen to involve Mapuche youth (Bengoa and Caniguan2011). Indigenous young people comprise the first rural generation to have wide access to second-ary education (which retains them in full-time education for longer), and at a time of historicallyunprecedented levels (although in geographically uneven ways) of indigenous social mobility(Cantero and Williamson 2009; on Chilean generational shifts, Carlin 2006). Second, Mapucheyoung people, as documented later, envision prospects of skilled and semi-skilled employmentunlike their parents, and third, secondary pupils’ are growing up during (tardy) measures ofneo-liberal multiculturalism and widespread public reference to rights, international norms andcivic participation.

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Listening closely to young people’s perspective on these conjunctures, our work offers acomplement to existing research on Chilean-Mapuche and indigenous youth in Latin America.Previous research on Mapuche youth tends to focus on young people at university and in politicalactivism (Álamos and Furnaro 2013), on friendship between indigenous and non-indigenousyoung people (González and De Tezanos-Pinto 2014) and on non-indigenous youth acting in soli-darity with indigenous movements. There is also extensive research on primary school-aged chil-dren’s identity formation and schooling experiences (Relmuan 2005; Ortiz 2009). Althoughmobilization, individualization, civic participation and attitudes to the state feature in researchon Chile (e.g. Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Schild 2000; Cleuren 2007), these topicsare not addressed from a youth’s – especially indigenous – perspective. The material reportedhere arises from repeated focus groups with 103 Mapuche young people (half girls and halfboys) at four secondary schools that had boarding facilities, followed by 18 in-depth interviewswith a sub-group. The case study schools enrol rural pupils from a wide area, and were chosen tohave c.70% Mapuche enrolment. Research participants were selected on the basis of one or twoMapuche surnames, a provisional indication of background, and were then asked about personalself-identification. Additional interviews were undertaken with school directors, teachers andeducationalists; classroom lessons observed; and textbooks and policy documents analysed.Drawing on young Mapuche’s words provides insights into their active positioning withinongoing constructions of politics, racial difference and national identities.

A key constitutive factor behind interviewees’ comments is the fact that they are living duringthe week in school boarding facilities, far from their homes and communities. Mixing with youngpeople from heterogeneous areas, the boarding schools represent a home-from-home, and a site ofdiscipline and containment (Webb and Radcliffe n.d.). Located outside small provincial towns(not Temuco, Araucanía’s regional capital), these schools and facilities offer familiar ruralspaces but inevitably shape teenagers’ emergent sense of civilian identity. Although ICTspermit pupils to access public media and socially interact while boarding, youthful conjuncturesare moulded by enclosure for sustained periods, as they are exposed to mainstream educationviewed by many observers as acculturating, inducing pupils to dissociate from indigenousvalues and practices. Mapuche teenagers’ peri-urban boarding experiences are hence key tounderstanding heterogeneous indigenous youth positionalities (Nahuelpán 2013).2

The paper proceeds as follows. The paper is divided into two sections each addressing differ-ent facets of the factors contributing to the ambivalently affective and vital conjuncture amongMapuche youth, namely land rights and secondary education. Each of these spheres hold outthe promise of futures of individual rights and social transformation, yet each are framed byneo-liberal logics that reproduce – on shifting socio-spatial bases – exclusion and racial-civic hier-archies, while requiring Mapuche teenagers to assimilate into hegemonic modalities of ‘imaginedadulthoods’ of Chilean civic recognition and a life free of racism. Section 2 focuses on youngpeoples’ discussions of Mapuche land claims, contextualising them in relation to neo-liberalpolicy and ethnic political discourse. Section 3 examines young peoples’ accounts of education,and how it constitutes a sense of their future lives as workers, citizens and members of civilsociety. Contextualising the young peoples’ discussion in relation to Mapuche political discoursesand Chilean political cultures permits a close analysis of young peoples’ positionality with regardto community, schooling and citizenship. The paper argues that secondary-school Mapuche areneither apathetic political youth, nor dangerously radicalized militants, but subject to neo-liberal and postcolonial channelling of their positionality as soon-to-be Chilean adults.Whereas indigenous social movement leaders and community representatives articulate rural,communitarian and essentialised representations of Mapuche culture (McFall and Morales2000; Terwindt 2009), the teenagers we spoke to in the majority articulated their positionality

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in regard to land–territory, futures in work, education, and as citizens in ways deeply marked byChile’s neo-liberal individualizing social norms.

2. Land–territory and the meaning of being Mapuche

Land and territory lie at the heart of Mapuche’s postcolonial experiences, informing evocative andpowerful agendas for change. Mapuche refers to people of the land, and at the heart of manyMapuche political organisations’ calls for political and administrative autonomy within Chilelie visions of a coherent, culturally distinctive and highly symbolic place. Mapuche organisationssuch as Consejo de Todas Las Tierras frame state multiculturalism as colonising and assimilatory,envisioning in its place autonomous ethnic territories with self-governance (Saavedra 2002;Richards 2013). Today, the state oversees a series of broadly neo-liberal multicultural policiesto address indigenous concerns in a limited way, such as in the ‘Origins’ programme in education,health and development, and the CONADI corporation that distributes small funds for recoveringancestral lands and agricultural development (Carruthers and Rodriguez 2009; Bengoa and Cani-guan 2011). This section documents that most rural Mapuche teenagers interviewed envision theland in ways that are markedly different to indigenous leaders’ focus on land as the heart ofMapuche aspirations. However, we start with the views of a minority of pupils whose perspectivesare closer to, although not identical with, those of Mapuche political organisation discourse.

2.1. Alienation and cynicism: expressions of political critique among Mapuche teenagers

A minority of rural indigenous teenagers are highly sceptical and critical regarding the state’s rolein perpetuating inequalities between Chilean society and indigenous groups. These cynical pos-itions serve to elucidate the conjuncture faced by the present generation around state-circulateddiscourses of development, progress, life chances and cultural diversity.3

Pupil 3: Someone who’s ill-informed might think that it’s because [Mapuche activists] are bored andstart to do stuff. [Chileans] always think that it’s about recovering lands and that’s why [activists] messthings up. But what they don’t realise is they first sent letters, documents, asked for appointments andjust got ignored.Pupil 2: Then what the government does is make the [general public] see what they want them to seeand not the reality. So they start to say ‘yes, we give them something and they just start terroristactivity that they are doing this and threatening with that’. [Chileans] don’t realise that [activists]asked for something and haven’t been given it yet. It’s like they want to cover up the requestsmade by emphasising the supposed disorder caused. So it’s their [Chilean government] fault, butthey want to give the impression that they’re in the right. (Focus group #30, male, 19 years, andfemale, 16 years)4

This group argues that the state was complicit in blocking Mapuche’s full democratic and civilrights, with government responses only provoked through public acts of disruption, in turnframed as anti-national (also Bengoa and Caniguan 2011, 12). Levels of disillusionment withthe formal political system are profound among these young people:

7: What’s more, we [Mapuche] do things [make requests] according to the norm, I mean, our eldersapproach them [government authorities] to speak in the proper way, but the Chileans don’t respondthat [proper] way and that’s what makes us angry. The only way to make them listen to us is behavinglike that [protesting] because there’s no other way of making them listen. (F9, female, 16)

Similarly, a male pupil argued:

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1: There’s a conspiracy, I think there is a conspiracy between them all [government authorities]because the government don’t listen to us and when [Mapuche activists] see that, they act in an aggres-sive manner, so in the end neither [party] acts correctly. (F21, 15; also F16, male, 17)

This group also justifies protest, positioning themselves – and by extension, other Mapuche – asvalid interlocutors with the state. However as Jeffrey (2012) suggests, young people have to navi-gate power structures to constitute their own practices of agency. Hence, Mapuche youth’s wordsdo not merely echo adult leadership, but reflect active formations of political identification in aspecific civic political landscape. Unwilling to be pigeonholed or stereotyped, pupils werequick to distinguish Mapuche demands from mindless vandalism or criminal activity.

Endorsement of indigenous rights was relatively unanimous, although teenagers did not indi-cate any involvement in activism as secondary students or as Mapuche.5 However, approval ofactivism was not universal. Among those advocating protest to achieve social justice, they empha-sise support discursively by identifying themselves with Mapuche, whilst disociating from a (non-indigenous) Chilean identity:

5: Yes, they always have to say ‘the terrorists’ about those who are somewhat violent and what’s morethe Chileans are quite offensive about us.7: Yes but you also have to recognise that in some cases we can be quite rude about them [Chileans].5: Yes but we ask for lands and they say, ‘ah, the terrorists are out burning trucks, estates, whatever,and they just want to take advantage [of others]’.7: They only see the damage caused but not the objective that we want to achieve. (F9, male, 17 andfemale, 16; added emphasis)

Confirming in-group ethnic status, these secondary pupils re-contextualized acts of aggression tooffer explanations for political demands. With high levels of youth participation, the ‘terrorist’label is extensively applied to this age group. During Lagos’ presidency and Bachelet’s firstterm of office, minors under 18 years were detained and charged under the anti-terror law,rather than the appropriate penal code.

Expressing disillusionment with Chilean politics, three pupils criticized media support for thestate and normalizing the narrative of Mapuche terrorism:

2: On the news, the state shows what it suits them to show.Researcher: And why do you think it suits them to show the Mapuche in this way?5: Because they make themselves the victims.2: Because that way they can create the idea that the Mapuche are terrorists and they want to cover upthe fact that they are wrong or behave wrongly. (F33, female, 17 and male, 17)

Mapuche youth hence engage wider debates about Chile’s print media bias, which has a longhistory of portraying Mapuche in unfavourable terms (Foerster and Vergara 2000).

In interviews, indigenous pupils argue that framing Mapuche as terrorists and anti-democraticde-authorises the validity of rights claims. Mapuche youth challenged this by re-framing thepolice force as infringing civil liberties, and questioning the lawfulness of police behaviour:

1: During the [student protests], they took hold of children who had nothing to do with disorderly be-haviour, while leaving those wearing balaclavas to run. Likewise in Carahue [in Araucanía region]when they marched to protest about healthcare, there were people who had recently had operationsand wanted to support [the march] and the police grabbed them as though they didn’t care. Therewas even a woman with a baby in her arms passing by and the police threw the baby on theground and put the woman in the police van. (F18, female, 15)

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Mapuche youth are aware how certain indigenous settlements – especially in Araucanía – havebeen securitized, and the attendant risk to young people (Ray 2008; ANIDE 2011).

Building on these interpretations, a small number of Mapuche youth are emphatic that thedefinition of a terrorist act is better applied to the historic usurpation of indigenous lands, andto groups blocking Mapuche demands. Turning the aggressor label back, Mapuche youth re-frame social justice, aligning the state with misrepresentation and historic debts of territorialdispossession.

1: In cases where they call them [Mapuche] terrorists, it’s because they [the state] doesn’t recognisethey are fighting for what’s theirs. It was all theirs but they [the state] took it from them and now treatthem as terrorists. I don’t think they are the ones who are the terrorists because in the end they weren’tthe ones stealing lands. (F30, female, 18; also F26, female, 15)

As widely reported in Chilean public culture during political confrontations over the past decade,the state and elites criminalize Mapuche protests as incitements to ‘terror’ and a threat to nationalsecurity, leading to prosecutions under Pinochet’s anti-terrorism law (Mella Seguel 2007; Car-ruthers and Rodriguez 2009; Richards 2010).

During the past two decades, Mapuche youth have been at the forefront of civic activism,and three youths were shot and killed by police. According to Mapuche organisations andInternet users, the deaths of these weichafe (warriors) represent assassinations by repressivepolice.6 However, interlocutors in Araucanía schools instead focus on disproportionatepolice action that results in a heavy-handed approach to protests and thence to anti-indigenousfeeling.

4: They [the police] go too far. If they [Mapuche] are fighting for their lands it’s because they belong tothem, but the police go too far because they are Mapuche. (F26, female, 16)

Other pupils, however, denied that it was a racial issue, blaming instead the generalized lack ofrespect for young people among the police.

In this section, we documented how the vital conjuncture facing some of the Mapuche youthrevolves around contested relations of indigenous territory and a postcolonial state, positioningthemselves as critical civic actors with broad sympathy to historic claims. Articulating a senseof anger against injustice, these young people’s words highlight their self-positioning regardinga moment of heightened ethnic conflict, without referring to the educational or neo-liberalcontext.

2.2. Ambivalent perceptions of land, property and indigenous claims

In comparison with more politicized statements discussed earlier, many Mapuche youthsexpressed ambivalence about indigenous protest, a positionality that reflected school versionsof colonial histories, and opinions regarding contemporary generational transitions in ethnicand territorial identity. In particular, some pupils perceive a rupture between traditionalMapuche society living on the land and today’s protests, which they frame as embedded inlegal–political disputes. Mapuche youths’ ambivalence is shown here to reflect school-impartedinformation, and intersubjective familial positions. For many Mapuche, the vital conjuncturethrough which they constitute their sense of belonging and difference arises in relation to neo-liberal conceptions of land and territory, combined with shifting generational expectationsabout indigenous self-identification.

Almost without exception, the secondary-schoolers self-identified as Chilean-Mapuche, asnational and indigenous, and were reluctant to label the Chilean public as unequivocally racist.

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Identifying where the blame lies for Chilean-Mapuche social divisions is not straightforward intheir accounts:

3: They just want to recover their lands. That’s all. They were theirs and then had them taken away.2: The Chileans see it as something negative; they see the Mapuche as bad people.3: Yes, because they cause destruction, just complete… and then the Chilean -2: [interrupts] – but they [Mapuche activists] do go too far sometimes.5: It’s not that they go too far, but rather there’s always someone in a group who -1: [interrupts] – goes about causing disruption. (F11, all participants male, 16)

Overall, young people share a consensus that Mapuche have the right to pursue civil rights, butunlike Mapuche leadership and a critical minority (above), many retain confidence in institutio-nalised, state-based processes of claim-making. Reflecting these widely held views, one pupilargued against indigenous activism:

2: It’s not that I’m uninterested. It would be good to hear what they [Mapuche activists] want to say,and that something might be done about what they request and in some way participate and supportthat. But not to go and be part of something negative, because you can’t achieve anything by doingthings in a negative way. (F27, male, 16)

Pupils claim that extreme forms of protest were detrimental to the legitimate claims of theMapuche majority and contribute in part to the formation of essentialised public stereotypes ofthe indigenous as backward or incapable of progressing.7 Youth understandings of the kinds ofpeople they can become in future are hence framed within racialized criteria, influencing theways they negotiate the territorial, educational and civic dimensions of vital conjectures.

Discussions nevertheless reveal contrasting perspectives. While many voiced fear of thepolice, others suggested that the police were more afraid of protesters.8 A number are unwillingto participate in any kind of protest:

5: How often are those marches peaceful? They reach midday peacefully but then the state starts to getheavy handed.3: For example a number of marches are authorized, but then suddenly the state starts to repress them[the participants] and that makes them dangerous [to attend]. (F33, male, 17 and male, 18)

Rather than refer – as older generations might – to military-era police brutality, the rural Mapucheteenagers are highly conscious of the present polarized context, and respond to the particular his-torical–geographical configuration. Some quickly condemn violent protest, downplaying justiceimperatives while suggesting that certain organisations or individuals were intent on harm.

1: Now they [Mapuche activists] do one thing correctly, then three things incorrectly. And that’s whythey [government authorities] take notice of them as much. Let’s suppose they are defending theirlands and that’s okay, but then they go from that to burning buses and fighting the police. (F21,male, 15)

Mapuche youth thereby distance themselves from radical and separatist ethno-nationalist dis-courses, situating themselves as subjects who carefully evaluate both sides of a polarizedsituation.9

Over half the pupils situate themselves in relation to liberal civil rights linked to personalsafety, private property and market participation in ways that indirectly problematize ethnicdemands. Pupils’ reservations about political protest are strongly linked to the legitimacy they

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implicitly award to private property. Instead of political discourses about historic ties to ethnicterritory, young people appear to be informed by school textbooks and republican histories thatomit systematic mention of military settlement, privatization, dispossession and legal separationsof Mapuche from ancestral territories. For instance, the national curriculum history textbook foryear 10 (aged 14–15) teaches about state purchases of Mapuche lands in the mid-1800s, omittingnineteenth-century military occupation, settler colonization, and twentieth-century land privatisa-tion, and the process by which CONADI buys land through the market to ‘return’ to indigenousgroups (Richards 2013).

Other discussions made express reference to a contemporary context in which ancestral terri-tories are overlain by capitalist property relations and processes of urbanisation:

4: We must claim lands back… the Chileans [i.e. non-indigenous co-nationals] screwed us over andso we are going to claim them back.2: How can they return lands where a supermarket has been built? It would have to be money [com-pensation] because they aren’t going to tear the supermarket down and say ‘there are your lands’. Sothe rights are gone, it’s a clean slate and time to start over again.4: Yes, but if they are going to protest about recovering lands, it will be for large estates.2: Yes, but the large estates don’t belong to the Mapuche anymore.4: But they used to belong to the Mapuche!5: So they still are … They aren’t trying to claim areas of the city.2: Okay, that’s fine. But do you… think they’re going to give them those lands?5: Maybe… the Mapuche want to recover lands so that… one day… they’ll have somewhere towork.2: But I think those who are interested in that are already dying off, those who are truly interested. Andthose who aren’t genuinely interested and are only in it for themselves are us, the young people. (F27,all participants male, 16)

Growing up with the normalisation of neo-liberal contracts, these teenagers broadly reproducehegemonic notions of private property. Although their discourses challenge dominant public rep-resentations of indigenous youth as conflict-prone, they also situate themselves as knowledgeableabout the crosscutting dynamics in play, which highlight the limits to mainstream platitudes aboutequal opportunity (cf. Smith 2012).

The Mapuche young people situate complex local histories of land firmly in relation to themarket, as an extended extract demonstrates:

4: If you think about it, next to Tirua the Mapuche sold all their lands to the forestry companyMininco. Then what happened? Mininco logged all the countryside and now they [Mapuche] wantthe lands back… they can’t. They sold them and gave up on the countryside and now want themback for free. That can’t happen. If they sold them it was in return for something yet now theystart burning the forests. How can it be the other person’s fault? The fault lies with the person whosold [see Carruthers and Rodriguez 2009].Researcher: Who taught you that Mapuche sold lands to the forestry companies?4: I know some men who sold and were happy to sell.1: But they say that and then protest!…4: [B]efore, the lands were rented out for 99 years. The adults who were 50 or 40 years old at thetime died before the 90-odd years were up, and now the new generation – the children – want torecover those lands. But until the 99 years are up on the contract, it’s ours [Chilean] and in the endthose lands are lost.… [A] law was introduced that says those contracts can’t exist anymore, so alot of those lands are being recovered either by Mapuche or Chileans (F32, male, 18; female, 17;female 18)

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Genuinely perplexed by overlapping market contracts, property and rights, such narrativessituate the market outside history and as the route to national ‘progress’, in contrast to indigenouscommunal land holdings that the teenagers dismiss as hangovers from an inadequate past. Theteenagers’ positions are undergirded by the sense of a generational ‘dis(con)juncture’ betweenan authentic traditional adult Mapuche connected to the land, and politically motivated modernyouth who, from their perspective, are seeking forms of redistribution which are premisedupon new rights discourses. Mapuche pupils use these reference points to clarify how they per-sonally are neither antiquated nor motivated by overly politicized agendas.

Other pupils go further, claiming that land disputes are now an individualistic pursuit, andthereby deny the existence of a Mapuche community, and a collective pursuit of justice.Echoing young people and teenagers elsewhere (e.g. Mitchell 2003; Thomas 2008), theChilean indigenous youth dissociate themselves from a collective ethnic identity and stress per-sonal goals:

Researcher 1: Are you interested in movements to recover lands?3: I’m not because I’m young, I have other interests to follow and they have theirs… I reckon they areonly thinking of themselves, not of others.… 5: It’s a personal interest for each individual. I think those claiming [the lands] are older and[although] one can join to support the Mapuche cause, the only thing they are interested in is thattheir own [lands] be recovered, and that everything return to how it used to be. (F33, male, 18 andmale, 17)

Directly challenging the geographical imaginations of Mapuche political demands, the rural teen-agers perceive different generational interests.

Elaborating this point, many secondary pupils insist that home communities were no longerthe locus of indigenous socio-spatial consolidation and identity.10 Although recognising the val-idity of Mapuche demands, the pupils also dismiss what they perceive as a return to the past to beachieved via land redistribution (everything returning to its place). Rural youngsters view lands asdisconnected from an historic, extensive and distinctive cultural territory, and as undergoing aprocess of disarticulation that ruptures territorial ties:

4: They [Mapuche communities] used to see nature as the centre of attraction but not anymore – nowthe young people just focus on chatting on the internet. (F31, male, 17)

And similarly:

1: That concept of taking care of the land will be lost.5: It was gradually lost because the older generation became separated [fromMapuche cultural life] sonow it’s difficult to find anyone who values that.2: Now it’s just something economic. There’s nothing ethnic about taking care of the land. Now theyseek different ways [of using the land], like selling it. (F27, all participants male, 16)

Pupils’ opinions hint at a shift towards a form of individualised (Mapuche) positionality premisedon personal interests and choices, a shift consistent with neo-liberal citizenship and normativevalues found in Chile’s neo-liberal secondary education. Although Mapuche society also empha-sizes individualization (Course 2011), the young people’s narratives reveal the hybrid, contestedexpressions of individuality being negotiated today.

In this section, we explored youths’ narratives regarding indigenous claims over land, analys-ing how affiliations with historic Mapuche territory are articulated. As the first generation withmass access to secondary education, growing up with heightened tension over Mapuche claims

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to territorial autonomy, the narratives chart a distinctive positionality. Drawing on the words ofrural young Mapuche provides key insights into ‘how youth are expected to or hope to actupon territoriality’ thereby enriching ‘our understanding of how youth is constituted and nego-tiated’ (Smith 2012, 583). Un-embedded from Mapuche organisations,11 the majority constitutethemselves as young people at a conjuncture defined by neo-liberal land markets, pathologizationof indigenous protest, and the normalisation of current land distribution. Some aspects of theirstatements can be traced back to the Mapuche and republican histories present in educational cur-ricula. Yet the framing of young people’s interests in terms of personal identity and individualland rights speaks also to Chilean normative values associated with neo-liberalism, individualenterprise and the importance of political stability.

3. ‘Getting ahead’ education, generational breaks and going into civil society

As with the issue of land, education represents a space within which Mapuche teenagers experi-ence vital conjunctures that are fraught with postcolonial dilemmas of belonging and racism.While secondary education is couched as the route to future work and un-racialized civic belong-ing, it cannot be analysed outside the framework of indigenous histories and the hierarchicalnature of Chilean indigenous relations. Linking work prospects and benefits of citizenship withexisting racial exclusions provides key insights into the directions taken by indigenous youthin transitions to adulthood. Additionally, the Chilean material suggests that these conjuncturesentail affective-emotional dimensions, confirming ‘the importance of attending to the emotionalgeographies of education and aspiration coming through from research participants’ (Holloway,Brown, and Pimlott-Wilson 2011, 4).

In their own words, young Mapuche expect to participate in education with the same rightsand opportunities as non-indigenous Chileans, and believe that this equates to a status lackingfor their parents’ generation:

5: Now I have the opportunity to get an education, an opportunity that [my parents] didn’t get and toget ahead, so they will feel proud of me. (F21, female, 15)

In such perspectives, rural Mapuche teenagers subject to a peri-urban national education echowidely held Chilean social beliefs that opportunities are ‘deeply optimistic and [reflect] individua-lised ability’ (Araujo and Martuccelli 2014, 29). However, other pupils are less optimistic and, assuch, likely to be more realistic about the link between further formal education and later oppor-tunities. For example

You can’t do anything just with a school diploma. Because in my case, I know a number of youngpeople…who reach secondary school and afterwards don’t know what to study. So they just dropout or some reach their final year, finish and stay at home. (F25, male, 15)

Nevertheless, unlike the situation regarding territory (see aforementioned), we did not findstrongly critical attitudes expressed regarding education.

None of the young Mapuches’ parents had attended university, and under half had finishedsecondary schooling while explicit anti-indigenous discrimination was common in primary class-rooms, facts that today’s young Mapuche are well aware of. Census data confirm that today’s sec-ondary Mapuche pupils receive twice the years of education than did Mapuche over 50 years old(4.6 years today) (INE 2002). Anecdotes about parents walking barefoot to school and lackingwriting materials make young people’s position one of relative privileges, narratives whichstrongly inform youth reflections on conjunctures:

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3: Schools were isolated and obviously poor and it was difficult to reach them when it rained [heavily].[Pupils] used to prefer working to going to school. Now education is much better than it was… . Forexample, they used to have to walk to school but not anymore. (F21, male, 16)

Comparisons with parents’ and grandparents’ generations evidence, in the eyes of Mapuche teen-agers, national development and civil rights, rather than structural obstacles or the ongoing lowquality of rural education in the region.

Moreover, young people do not associate university education with political participation –

either in student demands or Mapuche mobilizations, but with building a career path for them-selves (also Álamos and Furnaro 2013). Mapuche pupils expect that attending university willlead to stable employment, expectations that again draw on generational comparisons:

3: Higher education used to be inaccessible for Mapuche and non-Mapuche who had few resources… (F21, male, 16)

And another young man:

2: I want to finish school and start at university. I think a lot of young people at this stage think ofdoing the same, because young people’s mentality has changed [from previous generations]. (F34,male, 16)

In comparison with parents, Mapuche teenagers argue that ‘now they (i.e. the state) give us every-thing’, by which they mean increased access to education, a legal minimum number of years ofschooling and scholarships for indigenous pupils.

Nevertheless, Mapuche young people view acquisition of the tools of modernization in relationto a requirement to transform themselves relative to previous generations, whereby the terms of(self-)identification as Mapuche are re-structured. All the teenager interlocutors emphasize thepressure they are under to emerge from family histories of poverty, and expressed their hope thateducation represents the route out of poverty, or seguir en adelante [‘get ahead’] (F20, female, 15):

6: [My parents] always tell me off, saying, ‘it wasn’t the same for us as it is for you’. Because we haveeverything; but it wasn’t like that for them. Now parents are involved in giving [children the chanceto] study but they didn’t have that chance. So now someone in the family can progress [surgir].5: They tell me that I must study in order to be somebody better than they were, because they didn’tget that chance, because they didn’t study and didn’t finish school. So I have to. (F18, male, 14 andfemale, 16)

Generational difference constitutes Mapuche young people as bearers of unprecedented expec-tations about civic participation and social status, which deflect attention away from racial dis-crimination, a taboo and under-explored issue in Chilean society (cf. racial resentments amongLos Angeles high school teenagers [Thomas 2008]). These comments suggest that alongsideattention to childhood hopefulness, youth geographies need to pay close attention to thebroader socio-racial contexts within which aspirations and hope are expressed, such as postcolo-nial histories of racialization in Chile.

In such contexts, generational conjunctures occur not only through educational experiencesbut also become deeply emotional. Signalling affective ruptures with what parents represent,pupils mention regularly how older Mapuche were – and continue to be –marginal and unworthy.

7: We don’t want to end up like our parents, because for other people our parents are nobodies. (F25,male, 15)

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4: Because [my parents’] life is more sacrificial; working for us and telling us not to be the same asthem.5: We must become somebody in life. (F28, both female, 18)

Against this background, the pressure is on young Mapuche to ‘get ahead/go beyond’ (super-arse). Youth aspirations in this context are to be understood within a trans-generational andnationally scoped narrative about the importance of education in offering an exit from subalternworthlessness.

The desire to ‘become somebody’ – defined against an abject parental generation – is tied tobroader social values in Chile, where individualism and a career orientation are core (Cleuren2007; Araujo and Martuccelli 2014), and, according to dominant narratives, sufficient to over-come poverty. Nationally endorsed aspirations were evidenced by Mapuche youth narratives:

2: The goal is to be able to say to my mum that I’m working, that I have my diploma. And becausenews travels fast in the countryside, I’d like to shut up those who said we wouldn’t ever becomeanybody, and show them that – if you have the willpower – you can achieve. (F30, female, 16)4: [I aim to] have a better future, I mean, I don’t want to remain where I am now, because even inpoverty, you can get out of it by putting in more effort. (F33, female, 17)

Politically too these affective conjunctures work to distance indigenous teenagers from theagendas and visions of Mapuche civil associations. The teenagers interviewed reproducewidely endorsed Chilean values, which foretell damaging consequences for indigenous life-ways and decolonial agendas. Mapuche organisations have fought long and hard for rights toan education on their own terms, yet rural indigenous teenagers attending boarding schools inthe heart of Mapuche historic territory disavow agendas of decolonization and difference, infavour of neo-liberal agendas of personal achievement.

3.1. Into the work place: expectations for the future

‘ …what horizons, what futures, are imagined, hoped for, or feared.’ (Johnson-Hanks 2002, 872)

In this section, we discuss how indigenous young people are influenced by neo-liberal notions ofcitizenship and inclusion that are constructed around goals of becoming responsible entrepre-neurs, producers and consumers (Schild 2000; Mitchell 2003; Warren 2013). The Chilean govern-ment’s multicultural policies influence the perceptions of today’s youth generation of state supportand opportunities for civic participation. In particular, the awarding of scholarships, land fundsand community development projects encourage Mapuche teenagers to identify as citizen-sub-jects, and differentiate themselves from indigenous ‘extremists’ (Hale 2002). Despite enduringeducational achievement differentials between Chile’s indigenous and non-indigenous pupils,the secondary-school Mapuche express moderate optimism about their employment prospectsin what they perceive as an open labour market.12

5: We want to be trained in metal construction and to be people who can go out from here, not justfinishing school then hanging around doing nothing or getting paid $200,000 pesos [£235monthly] to work here. Rather, we want to be like any other person who is working. If it doesn’twork out, then we won’t hang around being lazy but rather we’ll be resolute, and out there I don’tthink people will treat us as differently or with indifference. (F11, male, 16)

Disowning identification with an indigenous stereotype, this pupil stresses the opportunitiesassociated with individual effort. Mapuche young people’s naïve hopefulness speaks to

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perceptions of rapidly shifting socio-economic conditions for indigenous populations. Althoughrural Mapuche secondary pupils emerge from school into overcrowded, discriminatory and inse-cure labour markets, they view educational qualifications as a door to employment choice.

4: A long time ago the Mapuche were always slaves or workers. But today, it’s not like that. Nowa-days, Mapuche are architects, police officers, soldiers, so there are many more opportunities than thereused to be. (F32, male, 17)

Despite police confrontations with Mapuche protestors (noted above), this pupil views the policeforce as a possible career.

In general, rural Mapuche youth position the state as an ally that distributes resources andoffers political and economic opportunities. CONADI was generally accepted as a legitimaterepresentative of indigenous affairs, while state programmes were perceived as an achievement.

4: Because now there are more possibilities, there’s more help, allocating them [Mapuche] things.Like for example, now there are efforts to distribute lands. Those lands are ours as a right so theyare returning them. (F34, male, 16)

And for another:

3: CONADI, which didn’t used to exist, is an indigenous corporation so there are a number of thingsthat are for Mapuche or indigenous people… They are being given due consideration; for example,now there are Mapuche mayors and councillors. (F25, female, 17)

Unlike older generations and political leaders who might recall historic or contemporary stateauthoritarianism, young people perceive state resources as unconditional and neutral, in turnleading them to consider themselves as holding a favourable position within civil society:

3: I think the Chilean state takes the Mapuche into consideration, for example, with the distribution oflarge quantities of lands. (F27, male, 17)

Other pupils noted:

4: Today the Mapuche have…Well I mean, I’m so happy with my surname because today they freelygive everything to the Mapuche.13

3: The Mapuche receive more benefits than the Chileans (F32, male, 17 and female, 16)

Rather than echo Mapuche leaders’ claims for reparation, pupils understand themselves to beworthy recipients of state gifts. Mapuche youth in Araucanía’s peri-urban boarding schools inthis sense are broadly in line with Chilean young adults (18–30-year olds) with their ‘individua-lized projects,… personal development, employment and tools of modernization’ (Carlin 2006,640; also Schild 2000). That these values should be so widespread and normalized amongrural indigenous teenagers speaks as much to the power of neo-liberal education and civic cul-tures, as to the dilemmas faced by Mapuche political organisations. In this respect, indigenousyoung people can be said to represent neo-liberal multiculturalism’s ‘permitted Indians’ ‘in themaking’ among a second generation (cf. Hale 2002). Yet Mapuche young people also considerthemselves to be ‘deserving poor’, hence diverging from mainstream Chilean views that publicassistance undermines a person’s ability to overcome adversity (Araujo and Martuccelli 2014,29), although some pupils did express the view that state ‘handouts’ legitimise social inequalities.Young people articulate sui generis perspectives, marking themselves as distinctive to politically

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sceptical or apathetic youth, by emphasising how state interventions improve indigenous civilparticipation and how opportunities must be seized by individuals.

In aligning with the Chilean ‘miracle’ (Richards 2013), pupils insert themselves in a trajectorytowards jobs associated with ‘national’, ‘modern’ landscapes and subjectivities. As they acquire asense in secondary school of what jobs might be available, Mapuche teenagers express normativeexpectations about ‘clean’, stable, professional work linked imaginatively with ‘national’ spaces,namely large towns and cities. By contrast, villages and the countryside remain peripheral tonation-building (cf. Radcliffe and Westwood 1996). For example:

2: Young people aren’t very interested in continuing to live [in the countryside]. There are few whoremain there because they prefer to go and study and leave home… They [parents] want us to be morethan simple bricklayers or farm workers. They prefer us to go to the city and work there, because thereis more stable work than in the countryside where you practically can’t get paid work. (F30, female,16)

Moreover, some emphasise global entrepreneurial terms (cf. Mitchell 2003; Ruddick 2003):

We Chileans have many opportunities for working, I mean maybe not many but there are some. Andwe trade with other countries, so there are many things in our favour to move ahead. Nowadays, pupilshave more possibilities to finish school and get a university diploma, which before was only availableto the middle class. Now the working class value [the opportunities] and there are many professionals… (Interview 82, male, 16)

Contrasting modern jobs with seasonal subsistence farming, which is relationally constructed as aracialized indigenous occupation associated with past generations,14 the teenagers narrate theirfuture in ways that further disengage from ethnic leadership visions of rural, self-contained com-munity development (Flores and Robles 2008).

The discursive and material conjuncture around work and civic participation positionsMapuche youth between racial exclusion and imagined de-racialized futures of civic participationwithin a neo-liberal market and globalized citizenship. These converging developments provokefraught identity choices for contemporary Mapuche youth that pull them closer to the status quothan Mapuche radicalism, closer to national norms than parental experience.

4. Conclusions

This paper examined the situation of indigenous young people in southern Chile in relation to thevital conjunctures they face during transitions to adulthood, exploring the territorial and edu-cational dynamics and settings within which young people narrate their experiences and perspec-tives. Drawing on the youth’s words to explore the everyday ways in which connections weremade between rural landscapes, secondary education and prospects for the future, the paper high-lighted the ways in which young people situated themselves within the specific conjuncture facedby indigenous subjects in contemporary Chile. Teenagers in peri-urban, low-performing boardingschools construe as normal an adult life mediated by urban residence, market-based relations withland and stable civic cultures of work and welfare. Constitutive of these perspectives was a racia-lized and affective understanding of how their futures must be different to their parents’ – andgrandparents’ – pasts. They foresee future rewards coming from hard work and individual endea-vour, leading them to overlook structural impediments arising from racial hierarchies. Ourresearch extends previous work on Chile’s ‘market citizenship’ (Schild 2000; Warren 2013),showing how powerful an influence this discourse and practice represents in the aspirationsand positionalities of rural indigenous young people, well before they become formal citizens.

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Drawing on teenagers’ understandings of the transition into adulthood demonstrated thatyoung Mapuches’ aspirations and agency reflect vital conjunctures at the interface between edu-cation, racialization, political protest and neo-liberal political economies. The racial dynamics inthe Chilean context raise heightened affective-emotional responses among diverse actors concern-ing transitions to adulthood, and the political, educational and affective disposition of youth.Mapuche youth express aspirations regarding their future but also ambivalence about work,education and civic staus, as neo-liberal citizenship and postcolonial racialization construct asituation within which family and community ties are represented as incompatible with socio-economic advancement and unmarked national belonging. In certain cases, young peoplebecame politicized, articulating viewpoints close to those expressed by Mapuche rights organiz-ations. In the majority of cases however, young people experienced this vital conjuncture as a pathendorsed by the state, parents and wider social norms to pursue adulthood visions consistent withChilean aspirations. Such visions relate to administrative and programmatic procedures ratherthan protest and radicalization, and legal contract and private property rather than ancestralterritories and rural livelihoods.

In conclusion, the Chilean case confirms that children’s and youth geographies bring todebates about vital conjunctures an understanding of the geographical–territorial processes thatmould the direction and outcomes of youth transitions. It also confirms the importance of consid-ering youth aspirations in relation to education within broader contexts, such as neo-liberalismand multiculturalism. Most importantly, the paper argues that vital conjunctures are not singularmoments of modern historical ‘events’, as they have tended to be construed in the previous litera-ture. Rather, vital conjunctures arise from and directly engage longer-term histories, not least incontexts of the global South where postcolonial exclusion occurs. Relatedly, whereas ‘vital’ con-junctures have tended to be tied to an individual embodiment of about-to-become-adults inrelation to an immediate socio-familiar milieu, the Mapuche case demonstrates that youngpeoples’ social relations, affective trajectories and scope of aspirations are analytically tied tothe dynamics of racial embodiments, the establishment of postcolonial citizenship, civic culturesbased on colonial difference and the racialized dimensions of inter-generational ruptures. Chileoffers perhaps a unique context within which to explore these issues, with its specific combinationof early neo-liberalism, tardy multiculturalism and heightened ethnic conflict. Nevertheless, ana-lysing the divergent trajectories of racialized and excluded youth through attending to postcolo-nial geographies and histories represents a fruitful avenue for youth studies.

AcknowledgementsWe wish to thank Patricia Richards, Craig Jeffrey, Amalia Pallares, and the audience at the 2014 LatinAmerican Studies Association conference for comments on earlier versions, as well as two anonymousreviewers and Peter Kraftl for close reading and editorial suggestions.

FundingWe gratefully acknowledge research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council [ESRC RES-062-23-3168].

Notes1. Nationally, over half of Mapuche youth are second-generation urban migrants, living in a time of

intense globalised connectivity, and historically high numbers are enrolled as university students(see Terwindt 2009).

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2. A small literature exists on indigenous secondary and university students’ residential homes (hogares)and their politicization, radicalization and autonomous organisation (Flores and Robles 2008; ReucaNeculmán 2010; Bengoa and Caniguan 2011). Today, 13 hogares with 412 places for indigenous stu-dents exist in southern Chile, the region with the highest concentration of Mapuche (see Marimán2008).

3. However, these pupils were not entirely consistent, and express less confrontational views on otheroccasions.

4. All materials are translated from Spanish by the authors. Young people are identified by number, andfocus group (F), gender and age.

5. Mapuche in their teens, twenties and thirties (a broad definition of youth widely accepted in Chile)have been central to indigenous rights struggles from the early twentieth century (Foerster andMontecino 1988; Crow 2010; Webb and Radcliffe 2013).

6. Labelled ‘martyrs’ of the Mapuche nation, they are memorialised; for example, a stone in a Santiagopark was painted after Matías Catrileo’s death ‘with your blood, the Mapuche Nation is reconstructed’.

7. For example, P1F4, P3F6, P5F9, P5F11, P1F30.8. For example, P3&4, F26, P3, F28.9. For example, P6F20, P1&5F21, P4F22, P3F28.

10. Mapuche political leadership by contrast emphasises the importance of rural communities in the repro-duction and valorisation of cultural practices, language and struggles for autonomy. In such commu-nities, young people would be expected to acquire knowledge critical of existing forms of citizenshipand repertoires of protest (cf. Lazar 2010; Course 2011 on Bolivia).

11. None of the case study schools were in ‘hot-spots’ of Mapuche protest in the Araucanía, as an inad-vertent result of our selection criteria (high Mapuche enrolments, large intake areas and the possibilityof comparisons between standard national curriculum, and intercultural bilingual educationestablishments).

12. Average years of schooling among Mapuche 16–29-year-olds were 1.2 years lower than nationalmeans of 11.1 (INE 2002; cf. Harris, Wyn, and Younes 2010 on Australian young people’s politicaldisenchantment).

13. Surnames are now used to award multicultural grants. Mapuche groups historically placed muchemphasis on lineage (surname) and blood in determining ethnic identity within and outside thegroup, and hence individualization is not entirely a western imposition.

14. For example, P1,F19; P1,F21; P3,F30.

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Temuco y Santiago.” Inclusión Social y Equidad en la Educación Superior 12 (January–June): 59–83.Alvarez, S., E. Dagnino, and A. Escobar, eds. 1998. Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning

Latin American Social Movements. Boulder: Westview Press.ANIDE. 2011. Violencia Institucional Hacia la Niñez Mapuche en Chile. Working Document. Santiago:

ANIDE.Araujo, K., and D. Martuccelli. 2014. “Beyond Institutional Individualism: Agentic Individualism and the

Individuation Process in Chilean Society.” Current Sociology 62 (1): 24–40.Arnot, M., and S. Swartz. 2012. “Youth Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging: Introducing Contexts,

Voices, Imaginaries.” Comparative Education 48 (1): 1–10.Bengoa, J., and N. Caniguan. 2011. “Chile: Los Mapuches y el Bicentenario.” Cuadernos de Antropología

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Self.” In Indigenous Experience Today, edited by M. de la Cadena and O. Starn, 99–115. London: Berg.Cantero, V., and G. Williamson. 2009. “Movilidad Social Intergeneracional por origen étnico: Evidencia

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Linkage in Chile.” Third World Quarterly 30 (4): 743–760.Cleuren, H. 2007. “Local Democracy and Participation in Post-authoritarian Chile.” European Review of

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