Cristina Maldonado

Alto Bio Bio, Southern Chile

 
 
 
 

(Modified from diary entries, 1/13/98) 

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I have just seen the moon, one day past full, emerge from behind the mountainside in a lead colored sky, with clouds whose centers are darker than the outer edges tinged silver by moonlight. There is a beautiful breeze, and it’s comforting to know that this night in Chile does not pose the hazards of a summer night in the Miami tropics (even the bugs can’t compare). I love these southern skies with their constellations and Orion upside down. I’m writing by electric light, a tiny bulb powered by a solar collector donated by one of the visiting environmental groups to the Quintreman family on whose land we are guests. Across from me, Nicolasa Quintreman and her sister, Berta, as having their evening conversation. Just down from New England, this night is absolutely balmy--I have on a long-sleeve shirt. Everyone else has been sweatered since sundown, and the Nanas (nha-nha--Mapudungun for sisters) have been peeking out at me regularly to see if I am not yet frozen. They are in the building with the smoky hearth where they cook, talk, stay warm, entertain guests. We made dinner there tonight, soup, boiling water in a kettle suspended from crosstrees over a twig and brush fire. We all came out smelling of smoke--those of us who were new at this had to come in and out of the building, our eyes were tearing so much. Nana Nicolasa is used to it. There are several of us staying here, university student volunteers from Concepcion, 2 older women, also volunteers, Sara Imilmaki and I. The sisters have a camping ground, farther down the hill near the river. What a place they have. There are views up two river valleys from their vantage point. Their land is right at the juncture of the Lomin and the Bio Bio river, tremendous rapids right there, favored by the rafters who come down, green and roiling and freezing cold waters, filled with life and spirit. Something in me wanted to cry when I saw it. I am always hopeful, but knowing what I know, I can’t help but be careful with what I hope, that the second dam, Ralco, just might not be built.

Already I have witnessed the clash of incomensurables, and incredible, unbelievable courage on the part of Nicolasa Quintreman. ENDESA, the energy company’s man-on-the ground, Guzman, the one in charge of convincing people to sign their land over in exchange for the settlement they are being offered, showed up as soon as we got off the bus, offering to help us carry our things down the hill. Everyone picked up their things and stalked away angrily, but Nicolasa’s nephew and son accepted help with their balon de gas. She was furious. Endesa is legally prohibited from stepping on her land. She and Sara stood up to this man, his soft words and empty promises (he really came across looking like slime in what he was saying, the patronizing words and tone he used) and sent him away with no hope for a compromise. Apparently, this persistence and omnipresence is how they have gathered together over 80% of the signatures they need. Nicolasa’s son, her neighbors, nearly everyone bends to some degree. I have never seen anyone so proud, unyielding, unbroken. In her, you see reflected the glory of the Mapuches, a people who were so strong; the Incas never defeated them. Neither did the Spaniards. Only the Chileans, at the turn of this last century and 400 years after most other tribes in the Americas had been subdued, managed to bring them down. Now, all of her neighbors are letting themselves be bought out... do they not know what they are losing? This is truly God’s country, with the mountains towering above and the valley and it’s river running towards the horizon, the volcano in the distance, the stars, the forests, the sounds and smells.
It is absolutley surreal to be staying in an Igloo tent just outside the home of a woman who I have only read about until now.

How we got here:
We spent five hours bouncing on a newly “paved” road. Normally the trip takes four hours, but it was payday for Endesa. A pickup truck with $250 monthly paychecks was making its rounds, followed by a veritable carnival of tents and roving merchants selling absolutely everything made in Taiwan that you don’t need to be spending your minimum wage salary on (mini electronics that quack like ducks and cluck like chickens, etc.). People have apparently, in the course of working for Endesa, stopped farming their land, so now they have to buy all of their food as well, and given the transportation costs, it’s very expensive. This area used to take two days by horseback to reach. We got there on an 8 hour bus from Santiago to Santa Barbara, a three hour micro ride to Ralco (town) and then the four to six hour micro ride to the Quintreman place. The micro was obviously from Santiago, painted yellow and white, but it was loaded up just like any other rural bus, a goat and a lamb, backpacks, boxes of groceries and suitcases loaded on top, packed with people and flour sacks, so heavy that on the biggest hills it would stall, everyone would have to get out, walk to the top of the hill, and reboard. The road itself it pretty scary, if beautiful. It’s narrow, packed with machinery, and if the micro came head to head with some logging truck or vehicle, someone had to retreat to a point where the road was wide enough for one to pass. It cuts across various mountain springs that keep parts of the road gravelly and slick with rocks they bring down, and at points, there is a huge precipice below you, no barrier, and the river, 200 meters down. Views of the rapids and the river--and passing by the white marker where the new dam is supposed to go up--right at the most gloriously breathtaking place.

Sara Imilmaki, the woman I am travelling with officially, narrated the various sights to me as we went along. Sara is a firebrand--she is an amazing woman, a true activist, but this group of Pehuenche (the sub ethnicity of Mapuche that lives in this area) is beginning to frustrate her. Sara is Mapuche-Huilliche, from farther south near Osorno, Chile’s dairy country, and the Huilliche’s have seen much more strife and oppression than the Pehuenche, who until Endesa broke the road up into the Alto Bio Bio, felt more of an affiliation to Argentina (whose border they are very near). I learned about Sara from a young Chilean woman I met at the New England Schools and Colleges Latin American Scholars conference, who was presenting her work in progress at a panel on Chile. She was writing her anthro. Doctorate at Uconn on Mapuche women who leave the South to work as domestics in cities. It occurred to me that she might now someone who was involved in the Pehuenche issue, and it turned out that Sara- who among other things was one of the founding members of what is now the union for empleadas domesticas, was also working in the Alto Bio Bio. I got to Santiago and left messages everywhere, finally, someone called me and told me she was accompanying two Pehuenche sisters who were coming to Santiago to give a press conference about student volunteers aiding their efforts in the area. We met the morning of the press conference and were on the bus down south that night. We hit it off incredibly well--I had been advised that she is the type of person with whom it could be touch and go, and if she didn’t like you then she wouldn’t help. Claudia, the PhD student at Uconn is a good friend of hers, and had recommended me, so that helped. I would feel that I am being fed a line, like I always do with Endesa types, but I can’t--there is little artifice in Sara, she is the most straightforward and direct person I’ve ever met- “Dice las cosas y queda la cagada, pero las dice como son,” she says things and all hell breaks loose, but she says things as they are, states the truth, as I was told by another of the GABB members...
 

The whole experience and the aspects of this trip that can be isolated as anecdotes were amazing, but probably the most incredible thing about this trip was the time spent just talking and learning from Sara. Without all of the conversations that we had, everything that she shared with me, I wouldn’t have even begun to understand half of what I was seeing. Much of it would have been scenery, I would have had no idea who to speak to, what else was behind what I was being told... Also, she herself is an amazing person, she told me stories of her grandparents, of her mother who was a medica--well-versed in natural medicine, of her kids--one son is an actor in Denmark with the World Theatre, which is dedicated to performing traditional tales and plays from various cultures. The other son is a historian, in Osorno... She was married to a Chilean (not a Mapuche), and he left her with two small kids, so she went to work as a domestic employee, her beginnings in organizing were there. Since then, she has had a hand in forming various organizations, and worked for most of the major ones, but tends to leave the organization when its direction begins to take it away from what she feels are its original purpose... She is very grassroots oriented in that respect, and finds formal organizing frustrating. Now, she is one of the three council-members of a group called Pacific Conservancy, an indigenous rights advocacy group. It looks like that is where she will go after this issue is resolved. Unfortunately, it is close to being resolved. She has managed to organize a small band of women who were resisting in the year she has been working in the area. In most cases, the men are more interested in getting a job with Endesa, in getting money (which they often drink away), in appearing as the head of the household. And Endesa tends to deal primarily with men, it seems. The Pangue project was advertised as displacing absolutely no Pehuenche indians. They spoke only with the men. Three of the wives of the 5 families were Pehuenche- ask anyone, and they all know that. And in one case, the wife is the owner of the property. She is one of the two women who went to Santiago for the press conference, but she would not speak to me about such issues, though I tried to approach her... There is a tremendous feeling of inevitability about all of this. People are shrugging their shoulders and saying it’s going to happen anyways, we might as well get something out of it... Something in me finally understands Earth First!, shoving bulldozers off cliffs and such, but here is where their friends are working, and hard as the work is,terrible as the pay is, and shitty as the deal that they are actually getting might be, the men whom I spoke with that work for Endesa feel that being a salary man has a certain dignity to it, and a hope that they might be able to get ahead, educate their kids and give them opportunities that being a subsistence farmer and nomadic rancher could not provide. What tugs at my heart is the feeling that somehow I have looked into the future and read their fate, that they are on their way to becoming part of the so called Fourth World, the migrant, landless, impoverished, dislocated masses that the drive of modernity grinds to powder. Is it worth taking the chance, and is it worth not fighting for your land because you don’t know its real value? That it keeps you alive and nourishes certain cultural aspects that you take for granted but that the world outside which so many are eager to encounter will devalue, this HUMAN/LAND connection that I have heard so much talk about in these days, this connection to Nature and the religiousness of the experience of living in an environment like this...

I sound like one of those cultural preservationists I have made such disparaging comments about--Man in his pure environment. I just wish that... I have a photograph of Nicolasa Quintreman. Beautiful photo. It just feels like it’s an image of the last person standing... And I wish that I understood why, if we have laws supposedly that protect the strength in such determination, like the Ley Indigena to fix and protect the amount of indian lands, why governments allow and encourage their subversion to promote things and ideals that are somehow much more empty, in spite of their grand schemes and promises to deliver. Most frightening to me, personally, is the realization that among the many uses of environmentalism, there are uses that are uglier than I ever imagined... Arguments can me made for diversity as well as for assimilation by wielding its discourse, its terms... GABB, the NGO, argues for diversity but deals with the Pehuenches only because it has to, or finds it useful to, it has done nothing to organize them, to train any Pehuenche leaders who can take it from there--strictly outside management. I had a huge argument--in Spanish!--with one of the GABB members, Rodrigo Garreton over these things, around the volunteers’ campfire. Then Endesa, and Gaston Aigneren, the man who used to run the company for Pangue, the first dam, talking about his spearpoint position within the company and how he is helping all of these poor people... A nice side benefit I’m sure, it costs Endesa nothing but handouts and puts them in no better position by just giving perishable things, hoping to defray the cost, the impact of relocation with a few bales of barbed wire, zinc sheets and a bit of money. I happened to be reading Wolfgang Sachs (The Dictionary of Development) on this subject before going down--the uses of sustainable development, and the perpetuation of poverty my holding up the “huinca” (Chilean, not Mapuche) mirror to a face and saying: you are poor--eventually the person believes it, or turns to a different model to achieve a different goal, almost without understanding why. Nicolasa has a different clarity: I’m not poor, look at all that I have!, she told me. And in a greater sense, she is right, and we know it. It feels like Endesa comes in and gives people shovels, says dig your own grave, sends everyone racing off eagerly to become part of this fourth World, blinded by promises of money and the vision (and reality) of the things it can buy, not seeing clearly or denying the truth of how they are being controlled and how they will be abandoned as soon as the construction is over and the dam is filled, unless they take charge and draw strength from their culture and religion and families and unity, not the fragmentation and in-fighting that is all we see now...

I can go on like this forever, but I will get back to the story and the diary entries, which I digressed from a long while ago... After the day which I spent interviewing Nicolasa, Berta, and Juan Quintreman, I had to go down to the town to use the phone--four hours down. That night, the Nguillatun, a Mapuche religious ceremony was also supposed to start. I made plans to go down to town, make phone calls, and pick up food to help feed the visitors who had been invited to the ceremony from Temuco, Lumako and Santiago. I would catch the bus back up and get off half way up at Malla, where the ceremonies were to take place. So I woke up early and along with three of the volunteers who were going home, walked up to the road and waited for the 10 am bus. Finally, it’s 11, no bus. A van came by, and we asked--they told us there was no bus. So, frustrated, we moved up the road to where we had a full view of the river valley and one guy who had a pair of binoculars started checking the road for dust clouds --I see one- It’s a dump truck! -- I almost died. It turns out that it wasn’t a Tonka style dump truck but it was a truck, used to haul dirt in, but today the municipality had it out hauling people. So four hours down, with a view of the sky above and the valley below, bouncing and shaking all the way down, wind in our hair, grit in our mouths. I could pat dust clouds from my hair by the time we got down. So I made my phone calls, bought food, killed time, caught the bus, bounced my way up, talking to people--the ticket taker, a backhoe driver, and then this group of six gringo kayakers who felt it was necessary to haggle over the $1.50 ticket until I told them to lay off and distracted them into a conversation. I got off at Malla with boxes of food, and walked up to the lonco’s (headman’s) house--there didn’t seem to be anything happening there really, but I was invited in and sat down for mate and fresh bread--Pehuenche protocol, as Sara calls it, asked about my background. The lonko, who I had heard relatively bad things about (weak leader, Endesa flunky, serious alcohol problems), was telling me about his visits to the US, about going to DC, and going to NYC and staying at the Kennedy mansion in NY... I tried to ask him more about what he had been doing there and how he felt about things, though I didn’t have the courage to ask him to let me interview him--he seemed so uncomfortable with me, he didn’t want to talk much at all, kept going outside and floating back in... Finally, I asked to be excused and went down near the road to wait for Sara and the GABB-driven truck. I waited like 4 hours, enough time to rinse my hair in one of the streams, and sit and ponder, and check out the operations of a sawmill that the owner of the land next to the lonko had set up--trucks of huge old logs, being split... Finally, the truck drove up, but when they saw that nothing had been prepared, and the lonko informed them that the Nguillatun was postponed 2 days, everyone just got frustrated and we turned and left, not much else to do. We tried to convince the old lady, Na Pancha, who was supposed to help the lonko but had backed out at the last minute, but to no effect (she was sick). It is a very bad sign that it was cancelled... Mapuche religion was explained to me as religiosity, not religion. It seems to be a cosmovision which incorporates everything, and channels forces--nature, spirits, energy--for strength. That is how the Nguillatun has been explained to me, as a ceremony to draw together energy, and gather strength for the encounter with the struggles and challenges that lie ahead. Sara and I were dropped off at Nana Aurelia Marihuan’s place, and pitched a tent in the dark (with much swearing and frustration, as it had been a long and frustrating day).
 
 

I interviewed Aurelia the following morning; she is another of the women who is resisting. She made time for me though things were crazy, since her family was leaving for the summer pastures up on the mountain-side that morning... Strangely enough, catching a ride up with Endesa people in their pick-up truck. Transportation is very important, who you are seen riding with has an impact on the perception of your stance on the issue; this is why the conflict with Guzman on the first day was so serious. Sara and I camped that night at the campsite which 25 student volunteers from the Catolica in Valparaiso are working on building for her, as an extra revenue source since she not selling her land. We spent the better part of the morning and early afternoon fighting with our tent, which had broken, and refused to accept the small repairs that we tried because of the tremendous windstorm that had kicked up. Finally, we gave up when it looked like the sky was about to open on us, and ran with our things looking like two ekekos, down the hill to where the students were for shelter. That afternoon, after the clouds had passed, I went to visit another woman, Nana Chayito, and spoke with her and her 12 year old son, though her 20 year old daughter, who works for Endesa, refused to speak to me. Not a good thing when the kids of the strongest ones are losing hope that her mother’s side has a chance to win... We went back that night, one of the engineering majors fixed our tent, and we tried to sleep while the UCV kids made noise until about 4 am. Brats. The next day...
 

Jan. 17, 1998, a rather incredible day.

“Three days that I haven’t written. Night is the best time to do such things--light is quite the technological advance, and since neither of us has a flashlight with us, well... Some things will be left out. I hope to keep the spirit of these days with me forever. Did I, we hear what we thing we are hearing? Can is be that I am really hearing the voice of the wind, a person playing frenetically on a drum, a kultrun, with a voice that sings and calls? We are sitting here, on a ledge over looking the river, surrounded by trees (there is a chu-cao bird nearby!) and with a view up river. We haven’t been far from the sound of the water, the river or the mountain streams, since we arrived.”

I have never had anything like this happen to me before. Apparently, we were the third ones to hear the sound of kultrunes--a drum, a large 2-foot hollowed-out wooden bowl with a goat-skin stretched over it. One girl heard them early on and was so upset about it, she had wanted to go home. Apparently, someone else heard it. I had never heard a kultrun before in my life. I didn’t know what it was before I heard the students discussing it... And didn’t give it any importance until we heard them, really heard them... It makes me wonder why _I_ am hearing these things, what it means to me, if anything is being asked of me, told to me... Is it just a sign of how troubled things are in this place, that even I can hear these things now? The day afterwards was filled with signs... The condors we saw like half an hour later, and later yet that afternoon, an aguilucho with its young one, teaching it to fly... Later, the flock of white geese all reared up and flapping, chasing away a dog at the same time as the shout Marichiweu! (Ten times we shall overcome!) sounded.. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the diary...

Watching Endesa operate fills me with repugnance. It is so subtle. And easy for them, they get what they want, don’t really need to deal with the consequences, private company can pick up and leave whenever, it has “no responsibility”. It divides families, neighbors, offers small promises and temporary things and makes it seem so much better, here, have a new truck that will only last you two years on these roads before is is shaken to pieces, electricity--which you will now have to pay for when before you had a generator running off your mountain stream and could even (in one case) watch TV, you had water and power galore. The real-estate business is rapidly grabbing the areas whose value is skyrocketing, it seems so odd to apply the term gentrification to a remote river valley in southern Chile, but that is what is happening, there is already a hotel that charges the equivalent of an Endesa worker’s full month’s salary per night’s stay. Why couldn’t Endesa have given people these lands, and not the inferior horrible snowed-in place where people are actually agreeing to move... Or, it shouldn’t have moved people at all. But all of these values are up for sale now, and people negotiate with Endesa if enough is offered. It’s a sign of the times. The kicker is that they are behaving absolutely illegally. They are not allowed to build blocks of land by obtaining the signatures of Mapuche people, under the Ley Indigena. And if only one person refuses to leave their land, they cannot legally fill the reservoir. Although my mind balks at the notion, I can imagine thugs dragging Nicolasa Quintreman off her land, kicking and screaming while the reservoir is being filled, so they won’t have her death on their conscience. At least not directly. I shall return in 10 years and see how people are doing. Meanwhile, the countryside around here is oblivious to the potential disaster. We saw two condors, perhaps three, spiralling slowly above the mountain across the valley and disappearing into the forest. A good omen? Chu - cao!
 

January 18, 1998.
Written while waiting for the bus back to Santiago in Santa Barbara.

... The doubts about the meaning of what I saw and the moment at which I left has left me feeling like my involvement here is so incomplete, so unfinished, but there is no question that now, I have been recruited into a new camp, and will do what I can to assist these people... Save the Bio Bio, bumper-stickerish as this sounds. It means much more to me than I can put into words, and if we (yes, we) lose, something in me already feels punctured because of that possibility... For now, I have a head full of ideas as to what I can do, ad new determinations that have been taken.

The night of the Nguillatun, there were about 5 Pehuenche, and about 20 visitors. The afternoon when the Temuco delegation had gotten there (this I was told, but did not see), there was again, nothing prepared for the ceremony. The lonko came out and, speaking in Spanish and not Mapudungun, told them that he was going to have nothing to do with the ceremony, that it had been forced on him, and he didn’t want the machi- the preistess-- to be in it because that had not been cleared with him. Apparently he was so aggressive, that a dog of his started barking furiously at them as well, and with such an encounter, the machi fell into a trance--was posessed by a spirit, as I understand it, and began to prophesy to the lonko, accusing him of betraying his people, of being weak, of disrespecting the machi and her assistants... We arrived much later that afternoon, and the ceremonies began at 9:30, dancing of the purum- which involved pretty much everyone. The purum is danced to a kultrun and a tru-truca, a type of horn. Even I was invited in by a gentleman named Armando, who works with a Mapuche radio station--radio Tren Tren--and was part of the Temuco group. He was the one who told be about the afternoon’s stories, in the course of a very good conversation we had. He also explained a lot of the religious aspects to me, and spoke to me about the ceremony. At 10:30, they began a Machicura, a ceremony to induce a trance in the machi. When the machi finally fell into a trance and began to prophecy--I nearly died on the spot. Although we had been hearing the kultrun played for the hour before during the purum, what the machi began to play, and the singing of her prophecy--was exactly what I had heard that afternoon by the river--a different beating of the kultrun, and a high-pitched, nasal singing, sing-song chanting... I can’t describe it well... But it was incredible. Under the starlit skies--until the moon came out and lit everything silver, the snow on the volcano behind us was absolutely beautiful. By moonlight and firelight, everyone gathered around listening to what she was saying, the area surrounded by laurel branches that had been cut, and the Mapuche colors, white and black and red flags, shouts of Marichuweu!, (We shall overcome!) Nicolasa Quintreman shouting loudest of all... The prophecy and dance continued for over 2 hours, until the machi collapsed, released by the spirit that had had its say. They carried her to her tent, and the rest of us retreated to talk around the bonfires and drink mate to stay warm...
 

The next morning, I headed down the road with the lumber yards, to catch the micro into Ralco. In the end, the visitors left, but more Pehuenches arrived, and it became a festival, much like anything else, it seems, another foregone opportunity to pull together a plan of action. I left in the middle of the deliberations to go or to stay, so it was a sad and difficult moment, but I had little choice, I needed to be back in Santiago the next day...

Obviously this whole experience is unencompassable--there is not way I can communicate what this was like. I can tell how I felt the energy that they were bringing together flow and manifest, in spite of the tremendous weight of worries and frustrations that hung over all of the participants that night... I can weigh my reactions to similar stories that Sara told me, that to me seemed myth, tales of river spirits and fabulous creatures, guardians of woods and countless flocks of sheep... Stories that did not allow me to understand them far beyond a brief suspension of what to me was their implausibility. I can’t communicate the power behind what seems to be reduced in my hands to ashes--an anecdote, a story in the trivial and slightly gringo/new-age experience sense of the word. In thinking about this for myself, I still try to find ways that I can build in the lessons learned--I feel that they were presented to me as lessons by various people, and that I have chosen to incorporate them into my life. Finally, it is as if someone had turned aside a covering and let me see the truth, to understand a relation to nature that involves entreaties to the earth, that you must communicate more with it, listen to it more to better understand the value and meaning of things, an underlying feeling that defeats all arguments in favor of this project before they can start...
 

I spent days in the clouds wondering how I was going to tell all these stories to people; this, I’m afraid, is the best I can do...

Con todo amor,
Cristina Maldonado, Amherst, MA.
 

Comments?: Acmaldonado@amherst.edu