‘For me,everything was about the continent’: Reimagining gender affects and collectivity through Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco (2023)

Abstract

Our article brings together two seemingly dissimilar disciplines, philosophy of emotions and postcolonial literature, to analyse Mapuche writer Daniela Catrileo’s novel Chilco (2023). We argue that emotional contagion is a positive move in the novel, as it enables a decolonial, gender-based collectivity in light of Catrileo’s depiction of the colonial legacies in Chilco. Because we see Chilco as a political fiction under an inter- and transdisciplinary framework, our purpose is to analyse how Catrileo’s Chilco illustrates women’s collectivity in a decolonial narrative drawing from emotional contagion and gender studies. Our article has two sections. In ‘Connected body’, we draw on Chilean feminism to illustrate the experience of collectivity, delving into shared rage and joy. In ‘Connected discourses’, we draw on Magalí Armillas-Tyseira and Anne Garland Mahler, Audre Lorde and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to illustrate the post- and ongoing colonial discourses that are challenged in the novel. Catrileo’s novel unveils borderless and timeless notions of gender using a collective voice both in form and content. Finally, given the dialogic nature of the article, we reflect on our intersectional experience as women working in academia and in between the Global North and South. This article is triggered by fiction, but it is the result of personal experiences too. Writing the article together mirrors a feminist and decolonial practice that, although inexhaustive, may have potentially practical and gendered consequences for collective feminisms.

Introduction

Reading Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco (2023) is a visual and a narrative experience. The book’s structure and sections follow that of a research endeavour about Chilco, which, we are told, is a plant. The first grey page, under the heading ‘Chilco archive’, introduces us to Chilco’s false authority as if it were a museum piece: it contains what seems like photocopies of the map of an island called Chilco and notes about the meaning of the same word. The origin of the word is from Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche Indigenous group from Chile. Chilco means ‘watery’ or ‘full of water’. The second page, under the heading ‘Inventory prior to the facts’, defines what the plant is, saying for example that it is ‘originally from the south of the continent’ (Catrileo, 2023a: 15). In between chapters, readers find six of these archive pages interrupting the narrative: Flora, History and Geography, Literature, Illustrations, Music and Cartographic Material. Chilco is not just Catrileo’s second novel published in Spanish in Chile in 2023. Chilco supersedes the materiality of a work of fiction. It is also an artefact as it encompasses all the possibilities of what Chilco means. It is an object for a museum, examined and fingered through different disciplines. Catrileo curates a collection of different Chilcos, intertwining them with a narrative led by a woman and connected to exclusively female characters and their stories only.

In this article, we engage in a transdisciplinary conversation between postcolonial studies and philosophy of emotions. Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco is overtly decolonial and feminist as it addresses how to ‘connect meaningfully’, and, in doing so, collectively we can ‘make sense of the colonial history and its violence’ (Binju, 2024: 195). A postcolonial reading, on the one hand, enables us to tackle the colonial legacies of Eurocentric epistemes and geographies referred to in the novel and consider the historical and narrative role of US American imperialism and the Chilean state as ongoing colonisers of Mapuche land. On the other hand, philosophy of emotions engages with such colonial legacies so that a collectivity based on gender proximity and common experiences is facilitated. In other words, we state that emotions are contagious, which foregrounds the constructive force emerging from common experience, which leads to the constitution of collectivity. Although we will not delve specifically into discussions about what emotions are, their nature and how they function, ¹ this view is based on Sarah Ahmed’s (2014 [2004]) theory of social emotions; however, we consider that emotions are more than an external property that can be transferred to another. Ahmed (2014 [2004]: 10) claims that ‘emotions create the very surfaces and boundaries that allow all kinds of objects to be delineated’, including, as we suggest, collectivity. We follow Ahmed in understanding that emotions circulate between subjects and collectives, yet these shared emotions do not eliminate the possibility of disagreements about which shared feelings are experienced together. Therefore, we argue that emotional contagion ² is a positive move in the novel as it allows us to embrace a decolonial, gender-based collectivity in light of Catrileo’s depiction of the colonial legacies in Chilco.

Daniela Catrileo is a Mapuche author, poet and philosopher. The Mapuche are an Indigenous group who see the Chilean state as an ongoing settlerhood, which ‘relies on the erasure of, and violence against Indigenous groups’ (Munoz-Garcia et al., 2022: 310), a common reality across states in Abya Yala, present-day Latin America. ³ Elsewhere, Catrileo (2023b) describes ‘Mapuche’ not as ‘an aesthetic whim or stylistic category’ but rather as ‘people [who] continue to exist in relation to multiple temporalities’, emphasising their ‘complex testimonies in all of their contradictions’. Marking a radical move from her first novel Piñén (2019), Catrileo’s narrative in Chilco is relational and collective, since the references to a colonial past and decolonial future are not engrained in the Mapuche identity only.

Catrileo’s poetic and narrative oeuvre is known for her ‘insistence’ on relationality as a ‘powerful proposal’ (Ramay, 2023: 79). Her poetry is infused with language ruptures between Spanish and Mapudungun, the language of the Mapuche people. In Chilco, however, such poetic manoeuvres take the fiction further, playing with form and content to distance the novel from hegemonic discourses about Indigenous women. For example, Paula Lizana (2024: 84) reads Chilco as a postmodern fantastic manifesto, uncritically attributing a rhizomatic hybridity and fragmentary approach to the novel’s exploration of capitalist and colonial genocide. However, our work sees Chilco engrained in a decolonial and feminist ethos: reading it through the ideas of a label such as ‘postmodernism’ is, for us, reductive. Instead, we read the novel as creating a simultaneous collective and holistic voice that, in light of Rafia Zakaria’s (2022: 4) Against White Feminism, acknowledges the overlapping traumatic experiences of non-white women. Such experiences cannot be untangled from emotions, and so a transdisciplinary conversation is pivotal to inform the analysis of Chilco. Therefore, our purpose is to analyse how Catrileo’s Chilco illustrates women’s collectivity in a decolonial narrative drawing from emotional contagion in relation to gender. Our method is inter- and transdisciplinary and underpinned by a decolonial and feminist ethos; this means that we use philosophical approaches such as Ahmed’s (2014 [2004]) contagion of emotions and Butler’s (2020a) gendered bodies alongside colonial tensions and debates about Eurocentric hegemonies (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010; Zakaria, 2022). Our method is supported by autobiographical and experiential reflections that we shared through online conversations across time zones and care responsibilities.

Chilco contains a plethora of references to Chile’s latest historical milestones: the social outbreak in 2019; the pandemic; the waves of immigration from other countries from Abya Yala, Haiti, the Middle East and Asia; the impact of urban expansion; and extractivism. For Catrileo, Abya Yala has a multimodal colonial past with a ‘multiplicity of textures’ (Catrileo, 2023b). In this context, we address the question of emotions in the new Chilean feminist movements, which have played a central role in the Chilean events that Catrileo fuses with her narrative. Using an ‘imaginary of political and affective alliances’, Catrileo (in Hayes, 2024) explains, connects readers with others ‘who have also been historically oppressed and colonised’. ⁴ Chilco introduces us to the blurry boundary between fact and fiction: it connects marginalised communities in the absence of narratives that reveal commonalities between them.

Chilco is narrated by Mari, who tells the story of her relationship with Pascale in the city and then in Chilco, an island in the South. Neither the country nor the capital where they live has a name, as the characters could potentially be located in any major city of Abya Yala, as Catrileo (in Hayes, 2024) herself acknowledges. Mari is Quechua, ⁵ while Pascale is of Mapuche origin. The couple struggles to survive in the capital in the midst of a social protest, the surge of sinkholes in the city and the spread of an unknown illness – again unlabelled – triggered by an overwhelming and rapid expansion of the capital. Pascale then convinces Mari to quit her job at the History Museum and move to Chilco. Leila, Mari’s Haitian friend, is left alone working in the museum in the capital. Later, the rural setting changes the dynamics between the lovers, since Mari is challenged to understand Pascale’s roots in this seemingly community-centred island. Pascale then disappears in a confusing incident, invoking several axes of inquiry: (i) the Mapuche myth of Trempulcahue, which tells that whales move between the world of the dead and of the living (Pez, 2024), and (ii) the armed conflicts between Mapuche people and the Chilean police in their territory, Wallmapu. Here Mapuche people are targeted, unlawfully imprisoned or have simply disappeared, even following the end of the dictatorship. ⁶ Catrileo ends the novel with a song about three united hearts, but not before adding a last image: a cartographic, real as it were, map of the island of Chilco. In Chilco, existence is informed by a personal and female narrative, producing both an imaginary yet tactile archive and a diffuse location, since there is not, in fact, a place called Chilco in any part of any country. This article is divided into two sections: ‘Connected body’ and ‘Connected discourses’. The first section is underpinned by theory from philosophy of emotions, with emphasis on how rage, joy, pain and estrangement are embodied by women in the novel, reflecting a specific Chilean context. The second section draws on decolonial theories to reveal the women’s collective connection using their common colonial past and legacies of dispossession.

Connected body

In this section, we argue that Catrileo’s novel shapes emotions as a political struggle, considering the Chilean political context and the formation of a collective body. We are interdependent, writes Audre Lorde (2018 [1979]: 17), as it is in the connection with other women that we find a way to freedom ourselves. In the novel, this can be observed in the literal and metaphorical breakdown of the boundaries between the public and private experience, which Lizana (2024: 77) also acknowledges. Collective strength emerges from the common experience of unsustainable living conditions, in a system of housing and overcrowding that literally collapses through the self-destruction of urban infrastructure. In such a context, women cannot remain on the sidelines of the political processes that affect them, since their daily lives are directly impacted by the precariousness of the spaces they inhabit.

The domestic space in Chilco is politicised not only because it is affected by the material precariousness of the capital but also because this space triggers new forms of collective resistance. Relationships between women are forged in this kind of environment, where mutual care becomes one of the main tools for facing shared vulnerability (Alegría and Vivaldi, 2024). It is transformed into a place of resistance and political organisation as has occurred throughout the history of women’s organisations in Chile (Faure and López, 2021) and, we are sure, in many other places too.

In the context of late neoliberalism, labour exploitation, extractivism and the precariousness of life are the norm for most of the population. The novel clearly extends these contexts by referring to the rupture against such a system during the 2019 Chilean outbreak. ⁷ In the novel, these conditions are expressed in an overcrowding, which bursts into the collapse of the capital. The outbreak of such social movement is driven against the precariousness of life. Mari tells us:

Había tanta rabia acumulada que la gente no esperó otra tragedia. La gran masa tomó sus propias herramientas y empezó a destruir los departamentos dormitorios, las cajitas de fósforos, los monoambientes, los guetos verticales, los funcionales amoblados. […] Todavía tengo la sensación cálida de los demás en mi carne, como una fantasía, el sueño de formar un cuerpo, un solo cuerpo, como un micelio que expande sus hilos para consolidar la simbiosis.

(There was such an accumulated rage that people did not wait for another tragedy. The great mass of people took their own tools and began to destroy the tiny one-bedroom flats, the shoebox flats, the studio flats, the vertical ghettos, the furnished ones. […] I still have the warm feeling of the people on my flesh, a fantasy, a dream to create one whole body, just one body, like a mycelium that expands its threads to consolidate symbiosis.)

(Catrileo, 2023a: 58) ⁸

The accumulated rage overpowers the possibility of tolerating the precarious living conditions of the inhabitants of the capital city. This rage, to the extent that it is shared, becomes a common emotion that comes to feel physically like the sensation of sharing a body. ⁹ During the social outburst of 2019, but also before and after in Chile, multiple performances and demonstrations showed this collective anger embodied in the representation of a shared body: the violated body. Generally, references to this shared body mediated by shared emotions emerge from feminist activisms and marginalised populations. These groups collectively embody the lived experience of precariousness based on their own gender. In this vein, the novel puts together those who experience a common suffering and give free rein to the expression of that contained emotionality, saying for example that ‘entre los gritos de jolgorio, emergía lo que parecía el ruido de una obra en construcción […] caritas manchadas de cenizas, pero sonrientes’ (‘among the burst of joy there was a subtle noise of a work under construction […] faces tainted with ashes, but smiling’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 83). That is to say that the shared emotion is based not only on rage but also on a nuanced sense of shared joy.

The transition from shared anger to joy is considered by Mónica Iglesias (2020), for instance, as a rebellious cheerfulness: a certain joy produced by finding and recognising each other, mutually affecting each other through marches and other collective movements. This means that anger and joy are produced by contagion; as Mari puts it: ‘Así fue como empezó todo, un contagio’ (‘This is how everything started, as contagion’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 73). Furthermore, Mari describes the feeling of belonging in terms of affective contagion that leads to an outburst of happiness, where Mari and the people in the capital were ‘contagiados por el fervor, la fiebre, una fuerza inexplicable que nos brindaba regocijo’ (‘contagious given the effervescence, the fever, the inexplicable force brought by delight’), surrounded by ‘una idea común’ (‘a communal idea’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 60).

Women’s movements have brought to light the tension between the public and domestic spheres, such as emotions, care and the precariousness of bodies (Butler, 1993). In the history of women’s movements in Chile, it is evident that both public and domestic spheres have played an important role in what Nadine Faure and María José López (2021: 294) call the ‘recomposition of the social fabric and in the recovery of democracy in Chile’. On the one hand, women’s struggles follow more embodied logics as they are concerned with the care of bodies through, for example, soup kitchens or providing first aid to those who are injured in confrontations with the police in demonstrations. On the other hand, according to Julieta Kirkwood (quoted in Faure and López, 2021: 295), in the face of Chileans’ obliviousness and the invisibility of the role of women’s collectivities, it is necessary to reveal ‘the existence of an experience of continuous female protest’, which should be narrated and recognised by its protagonists. Lorde (2018 [1979]: 33) similarly claims that her survival is a product of anger and pain. Catrileo describes this experience by focusing the protagonist’s gaze, and therefore the reader’s, on the shared body of emotionality, especially in its positive dimension – i.e. the happiness of the encounter – of the female gender:

No te dabas cuenta de cómo, de un momento a otro, te convertías en parte de la ronda, de la danza, del canturreo, del fuego. Pero al cerrar los ojos ya estabas abrazada a un montón de desconocidas que deseaban, soñaban y buscaban lo mismo que tú. El desaliento y la miseria se difuminaba en la sencilla y necesaria posibilidad. Un bullicio de entusiasmo recorría las avenidas, los parques, las lenguas.

(You didn’t realise how, one minute to another, you were part of the circle, the dance, the collective hum, the fire. But when you closed your eyes, you were hugged by many unknown women ¹⁰ that desired, dreamed and were looking for the same as you. The disappointment and the misery diffused given the simple and highly needed possibility. A loud enthusiasm that ran through the avenues, parks and tongues.)

(Catrileo, 2023a: 59)

It is through the collective notion of the body that it is possible to overcome the critical conditions of precariousness. In Without Fear: Forms of Resistance to Today’s Violence, Judith Butler (2020a) claims that through collectivity, it may be possible to escape from the inaction produced by fear. The assembly, the group, the collective, provides the necessary support to carry out what Butler (2020a: 11) calls a ‘courageous discourse’. This is the action of resistance in the face of violence, which, in her opinion, responds precisely to the precariousness of lives.

Denied basic conditions for a liveable life, bodies are devalued to the point that they are considered expendable and, therefore, not mournable (Butler, 2020b). Non-mourning, for Butler (2020b), consists of the quality of being mournable, snatched away from lives when confronted with loss. This is the case with marginalised groups, such as migrants, women and sexual dissidents, among others. For instance, in Chilco, Mari draws attention to the mourning amid the maelstrom in the capital city when the sinkholes begin: ‘nunca me percaté de la cantidad de animitas que la gente levantó para honrar a sus muertos. A pesar de todo, existía un lugar para el duelo’ (‘I never realised the number of shrines ¹¹ that people erected to mourn their dead ones. Despite everything, there was a place for mourning’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 79). This transgression of the discourse around progress, installed by the government and companies throughout the city, is known as a ‘theory of central conflict’ (Catrileo, 2023a: 73). It constitutes, according to a Butlerian logic, an act of resistance (Butler, 2020b); it claims the mourning of precarious and marginalised lives through the public demonstration of the affection of pain in the face of loss. In this way, resistance and a break with fear is expressed neither only through shared anger nor in the joy of the encounter and the constitution of collectivity but also in the expression of pain.

Butler (2020a: 69) also identifies laughter as an act of rebellion in oppressive contexts. As marginalised women, ‘we are expected to be tellers of sad stories’ (Zakaria, 2022: 46). In Chilco, Catrileo (2023a: 71) mentions the transgression of laughter when the system collapses and when the precarious town is abandoned by its citizens: ‘Aunque nos tomara horas de trabajo colectivo, cuando todavía nos quedaban energías, echábamos la talla. A pesar del dolor, encontrábamos la manera de reír’ (‘Even if it took us hours of collective work, we were joking around when we still had energy. Despite the pain, we found ways to laugh’). Laughter is another key affective factor to maintain the cohesion of the collective body. The threat of collapse is no longer only a matter of abandonment by politicians, the rich and the powerful. When imminent danger comes from the earth itself, it is important to remain connected, because ‘en esos tiempos era necesario juntarse a reír’ (‘in those times it was necessary to meet to laugh together’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 109).

The German-Chilean political scientist Norbert Lechner (1988: 99) argues that the history of Latin America can be read in terms of fear of invasion and of the contagion of what is different. Such fear, Lechner (1988: 99) says, foregrounds the constitution of collectivities; moreover, he goes so far as to suggest that Abya Yala’s history is a ‘history of invasions’, and that ‘a continuous and reciprocal “occupation of the land”’, transformed into an ancestral fear of the invader or the other, is passed from generation to generation. This is similarly described by Ahmed (2014 [2004]), since this fear remains at the core of hatred towards marginalised groups to protect a supposedly shared purity amongst the majority. However, from our perspective, Catrileo’s collectivity does the opposite by nevertheless grounding her representation of collectivity on a historical process. In fact, by invoking a German-Chilean political scientist, we are also challenging the epistemic implication of considering fear as a negative, avoidable feature. As Catrileo shows, the community made out of vulnerable populations in the capital city in the novel reflects the reality of Abya Yala. This means that there is no fear, but an embracing of hybridity. Women do not just share precariousness and affections that converge and mix, but they are contagious. Our positive stance towards contagion is consistent with the author’s perception of her own identity and that of the community. Contagion means to be happily tainted, marked and hybrid. For this reason, the following concepts are explicitly or implicitly abundant in the novel: quiltro (meaning mongrel or street dog; a word from Mapudungun that is commonly used in Chile), mestizo (meaning mixed race) and champurria, which means an embracing of not-belonging to a Mapuche community or to a Chilean state. As Mari explains: ‘En la ciudad éramos unos quiltros, sin genealogía. Habíamos crecido en una capital de mescolanzas, un salpicón de matices, acentos y lenguas’ (‘In the city we were quiltros, without genealogy. We were brought up in a capital full of mixtures, in a medley of nuances, accents, and languages’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 40). The process of re-signifying such hybridity towards a sense of positive contamination or contagion in her identity is the focus of Catrileo’s latest non-fiction work. ¹² We therefore displace the idea of fear of impurity from a European epistemological stance on geography towards an extension of Catrileo’s champurria not just to the gendered sense of self but to Abya Yala’s collectivity too.

Once on the island, Mari experiences collective and common affection from the outside. She is, this time, left in the margins of the formation of a common body like the one she was previously part of in the capital; however, this body is constituted from the experience of the common territory, language and rhythm – one that she does not share:

Los chilqueños comparten un idioma común, como un quipu enmarañado que les zurce por dentro. No sólo queda en evidencia ante la mención de ciertas palabras y su pronunciación, sino también cuando conversan sobre la isla frente a los extraños, como si fueran parte de una afección común. Un dolor o una alegría en alguna zona del cuerpo.

(People from Chilco share a common language, like a tangled quipu ¹³ woven from inside. It is not just evident from certain words and pronunciations, but also when they talk about the island in front of strangers, as if they were part of a common affection. Some pain or joy in some part of the body.)

(Catrileo, 2023a: 162)

Mari is a stranger and an outsider. In her own words, ‘de repente, me volvía incompleta’ (‘suddenly, I became incomplete’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 36). Reflections on contagion as a fear of the different other – such as those mentioned above by Lechner (1988) or in Ahmed’s (2014 [2004]) theory of hatred – seem to make more sense in relation to this part of the novel, since the Chilqueños (i.e. people from Chilco) represent a community that is hostile to foreigners. The strangeness and difficulty in fitting into the Chilco community lead Mari to live in a constant ‘sensación de encierro, a pesar de la amplitud del mar’ (‘feeling of confinement, despite the expanse of the sea’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 32). This time, the lack of community or of a common body that brings joy causes Mari’s estrangement. A common territory, language and history also leaves others excluded.

In Chilco, the connected body operates not only as a shared, physical expression of collective rage and resilience but also as a symbolic space where individual identities blend into a collective identity. This merging is particularly vivid in the characters’ embodiment of ‘one body’ amid the protests, where boundaries dissolve to create a ‘mycelium-like’ web of interdependent threads (Catrileo, 2023a: 58). This imagery illustrates how collective emotions produce a tactile sense of unity, as emotions like anger and joy ripple through the crowd, binding individuals through shared vulnerability and mutual recognition. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2014 [2004]) understanding that emotions delineate the ‘surfaces’ of collectivity, Chilco amplifies how emotional experiences contribute to social and political bonds. These connections – formed through both physical and affective proximity – challenge traditional narratives of individualism, underscoring the transformative power of embodied and emotional contagion to reshape social realities. This section has shown how emotional connections are informed by shared histories of forced migration and dispossession. The decolonial discourses underpinning these connections will be explained in the next section.

Connected discourses

This second section delves into Abya Yala theorists to uncover Indigenous and migrant identities with common decolonial relations, which include a collective hybrid linguistic relation, the essentialist view on Mapuche, hegemonic discourses like the museum and the influence of US American interventions, as well as a connection with other hybrid identities. At the beginning of their relationship, Mari and Pascale realise that many of their word choices are from both Quechua and Mapudungun. Mari brings this to Pascale’s attention, saying ‘¿Viste? No todo es Mapudungun’ (‘See? Not everything is about Mapudungun’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 37). Pascale’s essentialist view on Chile’s precolonial history is common since if any Indigenous agency is recognised at all in Chile, it is that of the Mapuche people only. For this reason, Pascale warns Mari: ‘Mira, Mari, no te aproveches […] Mi pueblo es mayoría’ (‘Hey, Mari, don’t overdo it […] My people are majority’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 37). To date, the Mapuche people are the only Indigenous group that resists surrendering their territory to the Chilean state. However, Mapuche people have been fragmented across what is now Chile and Argentina, and so their struggle has been scattered. As such, Mari teaches Pascale that a collective approach to their own history is necessary: ‘Oye, oye, cuidaito. En este país serán mayoría, pues … pero no en el continente. De todas formas, no porque sean más, van a ganar fragmentados. ¿Quién ha ganado por separado? Necesitan alianzas no separatistas’ (‘Hey, be careful, you might be a majority here, but not on the continent. In any case, you can’t win when scattered, even if there are more of you. Who has won like that? You need to create non-separatist alliances’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 37). Pascale continues to foreground Mapuche’s perceived high – yet still limited – historical visibility over any other Indigenous group. This does not mean, as Mari reminds her, that Mapuche people should not establish connections with other seemingly marginal groups across Abya Yala. In addition, Mari and Pascale’s interaction illustrates the potential of becoming a collectivity. Catrileo’s message is clear in following Lorde’s (2018 [1979]: 18) words, where ‘difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged’. Differences, especially in terms of number, are acknowledged, but are not an impediment to collective action.

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (2019: 6) notes that the ‘Global South’ is a discursive formation, which joins groups who are disadvantageously positioned within the capitalist system. The category of the Global South, although highly questionable, provides an alternative to understand collectivity beyond Abya Yala, and points to the reality that the idea of collectivity takes on different forms and names. Such alliance across contexts, for instance, can be seen in Mari and Pascale’s relationship. Separately, Mari and Pascale represent their individual backgrounds and subjective voices. Together, they are a partnership joined by the overlapping of their languages and several experiences of forced migration, fuelled by the rapid growth of the city. As Mari acknowledges, ‘mi vocabulario empezó a coincidir con palabras como despojo, colonialismo y genocidio’ (‘my vocabulary started to overlap with words such as dispossession, colonialism, and genocide’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 51). This can be explained with the following legacy of periphery attributed to Indigenous groups and migrants alike by the Chilean state.

Both Mari and Pascale recognise that their move to Chilco from the capital resonates with their own ancestors’ forced move towards survival in the periphery (Catrileo, 2023a: 29). Removing Indigenous people from their own territory also means that they defamiliarise themselves from their own personal relations, as Daniel Justice (2018: 11) notes. Mari, a daughter of Peruvian migrants, and Pascale, a Mapuche woman, have both been displaced from their territories but for different reasons. Rather than a historical background only, the movement for them is now a tangible, local experience. This background includes, on the one hand, the colonial history that displaces and erases Mapuche people from their lands: the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990), where the authoritarian regime redistributed Mapuche land for profit (Alvarado Lincopi, 2021; Crow, 2013; Waldman, 2012). On the other hand, migration, in the case of Mari, shares a similar history. Peruvians have migrated to Chile since the 20th century due to the precarity and unstable politics in their home country. Peruvians used to live in a very identifiable enclave in Santiago (Mora, 2008: 341). Furthermore, Peruvian women in particular are stereotyped in Chile as domestic cleaners under assumptions of passivity and submissiveness, enhancing their racialisation and social exclusion (Mora, 2008: 343). Catrileo uses Mari to embody the history of Peruvian immigration as Mari’s mother and grandmother were domestic workers who arrived in the country escaping poverty (Catrileo, 2023a: 61). Mari is then a product of the Peruvian legacy inside Chilean history. The intergenerational female and collective voice embodied in Mari and her ancestors serves to acknowledge and evoke Abya Yala’s multiple layers of migration and connectedness, not just based on Indigenous pasts.

European and US American hegemony is also an inescapable presence in the novel. The ‘deseo colectivo de independencia’ (‘collective desire for independence’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 121) in Chilco is potentially expanded to other Global South contexts. Catrileo’s references to the ‘continent’, without a name, serve to expand the discourse of decolonisation so that recognition is not exclusive for a Peruvian and Mapuche woman only. In this vein, borrowing from the words of Bolivian scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2010: 69), Global North academic and European-centred discourses do not pay attention to the internal dynamics of subalterns. Catrileo presents this lack of internal dynamics (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010) as concrete, overpowering architecture that surrounds Mari and Pascale’s urban experience. They are surrounded by ‘un aire secular de Europa para el capricho aristócrata de la epoca’ (‘a secular European breeze that spoiled the aristocratic ambitions of the time’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 30). US American interventions equally threaten the fate of the characters; in the face of disaster and illness, ‘esta no era una película gringa de acción, ningun superheroe vendría a salvarnos’ (‘this was not an American action film, no superhero would come to save us’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 100). This statement makes explicit reference to US American interventions in Chile’s coup and in several other countries of Abya Yala. ¹⁴ In addition, it hints at the long-held assumption that white men can save brown women from brown men (Spivak, 2015: 92; Zakaria, 2022: 58). Catrileo continues with this connectedness, moving away from the geographical lens towards the institutional one: the museum.

When Mari and her Haitian lover, Leila, work in the museum, they see themselves as objects to be classified, curated and exhibited for others. Mari tells us that she and Leila feel ‘como una pieza de museo, como una anécdota turística, o peor aún, como su salvación espiritual’ (‘seen as a museum piece, as a tourist anecdote or even worse, as spiritual saviors’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 34). This is not just a symbolic reference to becoming ‘objects’, but a literal one too, since European colonisation used Abya Yala’s Indigenous women to be exhibited in ‘human zoos’ during the 19th century. ¹⁵ The museum is then an extension of the institutions where both Indigenous and more recent Haitian and Afrodescendant immigrant communities undergo systematic dehumanisation. For this reason, in the museum, Mari relates to the whale skeleton in an animal exhibition, since both are ‘como animales en extinción’ (‘like animals in extinction’) (Catrileo, 2023a: 192). Chilco shows a connection of vulnerability through becoming anachronic objects and, finally, relegation as people and objects of the past alike, if not from the past only (Justice, 2018: 11; Lawrence and Dua, 2005: 123; Muñoz-García et al., 2022: 642). Chilco is, ironically, also a museum for us readers to examine these overlapping experiences as well.

Marginal or alternative kinds of histories are explicitly added in the novel in the form of a street dog or mongrel, Pachakuti. Earlier we mentioned the use of the words ‘quiltro’ and ‘champurria’, to re-signify processes of identity. Here collectivity means that we can also relate to non-humans in their ‘not pure’ condition. The dog becomes a companion for the protagonists. The name Pachakuti, Mari explains, means ‘the overturn of time’ in Quechua (Lizana, 2024: 82). ‘Pacha’ means ‘time’, while ‘kuti’ means renewal or time shift (Mignolo, 2006: 2). The animal marks an unclear boundary with the couple, showing that they are all in between the time and space of their identities (Lizana, 2024: 82). Pachakuti is both a character in the novel and a term explored by Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) in her book Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa. By explicitly adding Pachakuti as a character and concept, Catrileo opens the narrative for another kind of knowledge, that of Indigenous women’s discourse to intersect with hers. This is a subtle yet purposeful objective of her narrative, reinforcing Chilco’s reiterative push towards a new order (Lizana, 2024: 88). Merging Rivera Cusicanqui’s terminology with Catrileo’s own voice through the character of Pachakuti is in fact a collective move. Like both Mari and Pascale’s voices in Chilco, Catrileo’s authorial voice in Chilco is collective too.

The narrative of the collective body and the overlapping ongoing colonial discourses are evidenced in the collective character of Wapi, who live in Chilco:

Wapi, en Mapudungun, significa isla, que es otro modo de llamar a Chilco. Lo gracioso es que aquí casi nadie hace diferencia entre una y la otra de las chicas […] Sus identidades están fundidas en su creación colectiva.

(In Mapudungun, Wapi means island, which is another name for Chilco. The funny thing is that here no one makes a difference between one or another girl […] their identities are fused in their collective creation.)

(Catrileo, 2023a: 23)

Wapi are an invisible collective voice, capable of restoring a sense of collectivity that refuses a colonial, gender-based or individual reading. They are indistinguishable from each other (Peña Contreras, 2024: 14). They mix songs and share their stories through the local radio; they are experimental, they do not follow the rules of conventional artistic creation, even if some of the people from Chilco do not like them (Catrileo, 2023a: 23). Wapi are the ones that warn Mari, at the beginning of the novel, of her estrangement from the island (Catrileo, 2023a: 26). Wapi point out Mari’s discomfort and – we could infer – her lack of belonging and cohesion in the island. Mari’s initial discomfort takes us again to the affective impact of forced displacement. This uncomfortable relation between Mari and Chilco reveals the difficulty in constructing collectivities without, in the end, homogenising individual experiences or overlooking women’s past and ongoing struggles. This section has revealed the decolonial relations among women: these include their common colonial pasts, a history of forced migration and the role of oppressive discourses.

Conclusion

Catrileo’s narrative underscores the continent’s potential ‘crossing and unsettling of canonical constructions’ using the female gaze only (Armillas-Tiseyra and Mahler, 2021: 474). By not naming the city and country and reiterating the need to build South-to-South ties between women, Catrileo rejects a nationalistic and arbitrary understanding about Abya Yala’s borders and boundaries created by a single colonial history, that of Spanish colonisation. She goes further in highlighting how migration, neocolonial and decolonial discourses integrate – this time, in one single collective body that suffers, rejoices and mourns.

Firstly, we showed that contagion occurs when shared emotions are embodied in one collective body of women. In the second section, we explored how Chilco unveils decolonial connections between women. Chilco is a novel that invites readers to question women’s collective experiences, drawing on the emotional and historical decolonial discourses that underpin our realities across Abya Yala and potentially throughout the Global South.

Although decolonisation is a term that might be overused and inflated (Chambers and Demir, 2024: 2), Catrileo’s narrative challenges readers to take action alongside marginalised communities in order to engage, rediscover and recover conversations about liberation (Ripeka Mercier [Ngāti Porou], 2020: 79). Feminism itself, writes Zakaria (2022: 167), needs transformational change, where there is a revival of the collective and a return to the political. Catrileo not only revives the collective and political alliances, but she does so to counteract both legacies of colonialism and the inevitable emotions that those legacies entail. As Catrileo shows, a positive view on contagion and collectivity is also risky, uneasy and conflictive. Catrileo does not romanticise the collective: it is also tiresome and wearing. Her work demonstrates that contemporary fiction can and should engage with the dynamics of contagion once we consider the different realities that women come from. For this purpose, an intersectional view of gender is not just necessary but the core of such connectedness. The Spanish newspaper El Pais recently titled a review on Chilco as ‘the Mapuche novel that all Latin America need to read’ (Avilés, 2023). We would say that Chilco is about Abya Yala, and calling it a ‘Mapuche novel’ does exactly what the novel pushes against. For Mari and for us, ‘todo era sobre el continente’ (‘everything was about the continent’) (Catrileo 2023a: 121). In the process of discovering that Chilco extends far beyond solely Mapuche existence, we delve into connected bodies that foster collective resilience, where Catrileo offers a gendered, decolonial perspective on belonging and survival within a system that routinely marginalises and oppresses them. Both in the novel and between ourselves, we advocate for reimagining a connection between the personal, the political and fiction. That is the way to concretely experience collectivity, with both its painful and joyful features.

A transdisciplinary conversation about Chilco is not decolonial per se, just like an article like this is not necessarily feminist when led by two people who recognise themselves as women. However, it is both decolonial and feminist if it admits its limits. We support our analysis with Western and Abya Yala feminist thinkers because feminism in Abya Yala does not occur in isolation. At the same time, our purpose has been to connect our collective experience with our academic background, which underscores our individual differences while it helps to pluralise our experiences too. We are not Mapuche, and we often exercise white privilege in the Chilean context even if our ethnicity is not as such. Engaging with Daniela Catrileo’s novel underscores Indigenous women’s experiences in relation to each other, even if restrained by the boundaries of our often-uncriticised academic practice. The challenge of bringing two disciplines together means that we have inevitably put our own emotions into this article. We both lived in Chile during the social outbreak; we both experienced rage and joy yet also profound hope for the future. We have also been politically defeated in the current Chilean context, but that is an analysis for another time. Using fictional characters, Catrileo has reimagined what we have collectively been through. Because we have reinforced the idea that Chilco is not just a Mapuche novel and have critiqued how decolonial methods are often applied superficially, we insist on recovering a collective and political feminism, distancing ourselves from individualistic readings. Reimagining can take place in conversations that should remain collective, intersectional and transdisciplinary, like in this article. ¹⁶