Now you live and fight for Mapuche identity, but it hasn't always been that way. What has the process been like?

Andi Spokesman: In my case, the approach started in the high school stage. Then I had the first process of political formation, of awareness: the awareness of the post-dictatorial neoliberal capitalist society model. The popular education workshops held in the neighborhoods were important. Later, and more importantly, I started the process in which I met my Mapuche being. I knew I had a Mapuche origin from my mother. But my southern approach to Wallmapu (territory of the Mapuche nation), I started it about six years ago. I started to recover our customs and culture, to connect with the Mapuche territory. I also started learning the mapundungun, little by little. I'm not yet a talking Mapuche like Luanko and other siblings.

Mapuche is the movement that currently opts for more confrontations between the Chilean State and the capitalist economic system. That also led me to do that approach. Realizing, "Hey, the Mapuche movement is doing what I've always wanted to do": trying to end the system. I was trying to do it on another path, on the Marxist or anarchist left, on the Scarlet and Black culture. Then I felt it. “My people, my family, are giving more than those teams to fight.”

Luanko, you developed the youngest Mapuche identity, and today you are a speaker.

Luanko: I was born in a neighborhood of people migrated from rural areas, in the suburbs of southern Santiago. Since 1900, there has been a process of massive migration from country to city. Therefore, in all the neighborhoods of Santiago you will find Mapuche people with their political and cultural organizations. I politicized with hip-hop workshops. There was a very strong movement towards the year 2000, the hip-hoplog. I already made hip-hop, but the varnish of this music was limited to my clothes, in my style. The workshops brought me to earth through popular pedagogy. I was then 13 years old. It was nice, a gap opened, a lot more human, to build with the neighbors, we were doing tests ... I started picking up the workshops, and then I taught them in my neighborhood. Children learn what hip-hop is, its origins, beyond varnish. It was very deep.

That's what a new process joined. My father died at the age of 12, I grew up with my mother. Eventually it became more necessary for me. I wanted to reclaim my family's story. I approached my uncle, my family is still in the south. There was a desire to rebuild myself completely at the age of eighteen. I had a void, I wanted to know who my grandparents were and what they did ... The line that separates my first from posterity is time: When I decided, “I have to learn from the world map.”

I had a peum. For us peums are a source of knowledge, I don't know for you. Peums are a life parallel to earthly life, they show us the parts of your previous or later life to understand the present. I had a peum with my grandfather, he was talking to me on an empty plane. Whole sentences were stuck, which I still remember today. So I didn't understand them. With that peum I woke up, “I can talk to the world map and I will do it.” On the other hand, until then it had internalized some divisions that are also promoted by power, for example, between rural and urban Mapuches.

Learn the mapungun and start making hip-hop with mapungun.

Luanko: There is no established and closed learning method. Your spiritualities and rational choices are decisive. I spiritually delved into the ceremonies of the Andes, beyond grammatical learning. I also came up with the need to make a rap sung in Mapudungune. There are no kidnappings for mapudungune, nor for ayma... I began to question the political hegemony of languages. We are in linguistic exclusion. Our language is disappearing, it's obsolete because those who speak are old. Boys and girls don't use it in the day-to-day, in the game. I want to make self-criticism here: we meet in Mapudungo, and at all times we are speaking in Spanish. We are in that danger.

At a time when I was already talking about the Mapamundists, one day, as I was writing the letters, I realized that, from time to time and without realizing it, the rhymes were coming out of the maps. I was stunned.

Why the centrality of language in the construction of Mapuche struggle and identity?

Luanko: Language draws the way of thinking of your people, the way of being in the world. It is the knowledge and the heart of the people. By recovering the language of your people you are decolonizing your head, decolonizing you from state, legal, linguistic invasion. It's a form of resistance.

The traditional Mapuche world is rural, closely linked to land and spirituality, directed by the elderly. You speak of Santiago of 7-8 million inhabitants. From hip-hop to contemporary music, you're young. What value does that mix have?

Spokesman: I think the basic thing is to know the Mapuche tradition, to learn what our worldview is, and within that we've learned that older people, ancestors, are very important. It is the old who keep the kimen (the knowledge), who can teach you the language, they have authority in the community. In the Western world, on the other hand, older people are despicable and marginal.

We rap, a musical style that was born in the city and in the United States. But over time, a lot of people, also a lot of older people, have been coming to understand that we give our own identity to this tool. That we do not import gringa culture from the United States. That Rapa is the music of the neighborhoods, the impoverished, the villages, the migrants. We have to do an interview, with respect, recognizing the importance of the Mapuche culture, and within it the one that the elderly have.

Luanko: When we go south, to our communities, to our encounters, we are also part of that process. When we are in Gillatun (spiritual ceremony) we are not deaf. We dress Charilonko (traditional suit). We ask about the recommendations and guidelines of machi (spiritual guide) and try to follow them. We ask for permission from rivers and mountains. In the city, we also do some of these things. There are the connecting bridges. Bridges are our customs and behaviors, which make us deep, above our hip-hop aspect.

Under hip hop, we invented a ritual. I wanted to show my Mapuche brothers that everything I knew about the Mapuche culture is not Mapuche. We rented a car, and with the young people, we were going to the mountains. We were engaged in improvisation with ginger, around the fire. As we unfolded in the morning, we ate Mapuche food, we asked for permission and we drove into the river. The young people then are already ahead, and they tell me they still remember. I wanted young people to have at least one thing to do.

What you tell me reminds me to some extent of what happened in the Basque Country in the 1980s. There was nationalism based on more traditional values. Punk broke out with force, and that rupturing music from abroad, not without tension, brought many young people closer to nationalism and at the same time transformed nationalism.

Spokesman: The case of Matías Catrileo is known in Chile. He was shot dead by the police (2008) in a land occupation of the interior of the Mapuche struggle. Matías was Mapuche and punk. It is something that happens there: the people who meet with our Mapuche identity, starting from the culture that has surrounded us since childhood. We're the anglerfish, Matías del punk.

Luanko: Many times I've been asked what I see in the bathroom between the Mapuche culture and the hip-hop culture. It is a question that has caused me to reflect. They have common points. Hip-hop has an African origin, it was created by the descendants of the Africans who resisted in the ghetto. So just like the Mapuche culture, hip-hop is a circular culture. Both are also oral cultures. Hip-hop is sung in a circle, improvised in a circle, the break is danced in a circle. It's community. When we organized the meetings we would always meet to eat around the pot. The Mapuche tradition is also circular. There are the common points. There are the threads that bind us together. Punk is also born of the roots of the oppressed and the people.

In many of the Left, identity fights have been seen with mistrust or contradiction; from their people of origin, they have sometimes been considered as Western ideologies strange to Marxisms or anarchism. It seems to me that in your case there is also conciliation.

Spokesman: The struggles of the 60s, 70s and 80s of our people were built around those ideologies that have a Eurocentric axis, Marxism or anarchism. Despite the Mapuche struggle, it has always existed. We must take advantage of the best in this meeting. For the Mapuche struggle, we have to take tools that serve Marxism and anarchism, which is already done in practice. There are Mapuche political organizations, formed by field people, that use these tools in their writings or in their political lines. There are also many things you can take for your struggle, for example, occupations, stoppages, strikes ... There are many people who have approached the Mapuche struggle from the left. A nice Mapuche, heroic struggle that gives way to see the anti-capitalist and get wet from his vision. I myself once had a mistrust of the Mapuche: identity, nationalism -- but now I understand it in a different way.

I think there is a gesture of humility. To be willing to abandon some of the things of this eurocentrism that we have inside, to listen, to learn, to silence and to listen. It is like what happened to the first guerrilla group in Lacandona, in Chiapas, which also had a tradition of red, black and guevarist color. They got into bed and, whoa!, they took a cultural blow: “No, this is not to do as we are trying.” And they had to go on learning little by little, making ant, step by step.

Luanko: In the 1960s and 1970s there was the MCR, an arm of the MIR (Left Revolutionary Movement). Most of them were Mapuches, a Mapuche tool for land reclamation. They were recovering land, but language was not important. Other Mapuches were recovering the language, but they didn't recover the land, they didn't want to fight. They were two parallel roads that were not touched. There were contradictions. Those who recovered the lands acted under the Spanish culture in these spaces gained, following the logic of the reproduction of capitalism. They didn't know the Mapungua, they didn't thank the land. And there were people who, knowing the language, began to evangelize and enter the churches and did not recover the land. This contradiction has been balanced, the two paths are joining together. I also try to do so.

In that sense, are you an exception or are you part of a union that is being given in general?

Spokesman: I believe that among the Mapuches there are those who can endorse our assertion. There are also some who reject that, who say “our struggle is a 100% Mapuche.” It is also a matter of generations, even the older ones send you to bury the geese, “that shit is huinca, the invader’s beliefs.” And the young man can tell you, "Yeah, that's right, but he can make some contributions."

Luanko: What I have seen in practice is that the new generations are working on that pairing. Young people value the learning and use of mapungun. And the old man, who lives in a gigantic city, who generally feels marginalized, sees that some young people come to eat a mate with a bun and have a global map. It feels valued and links are created. We all have to come together.