“Is it possible to be Mapuche and marika (queer)? What do people think of those who are like me?” These questions sparked a number of conversations about how Mapuche history has been shaped by many attempts to erase the existence of the diversities that inhabit Wallmapu (Mapuche Territory). Thus, little by little, the vindication of our affections, denied by the colonizing regime, has been forged.
Ancestral diversities is one of the concepts that addresses this need. It is a term that was used in a report presented during the General Assembly of the Organization of American States in 2013, under the name Situation of human rights of LGBTI people and ancestral diversities in the context of Indigenous Peoples in Abya Yala. As Ange Cayuman, Mapuche writer and journalist, explains, it later became a term that “has been appropriated by festivals and film exhibitions, collectives and activists who work in audiovisual media, film and the arts” (Cayuman, 2023, para. 3).
We take and propose this concept of ancestral diversities as a way of naming and recognizing ourselves beyond the imposed notion of universal whiteness. Countering this paradigm, which does not consider the perspective of First Nations peoples, we emphasize that our indigenous identities are not dissociated from the diversity of our affectivities. On the contrary, our identities are shaped by a complex amalgam where belonging to a people and to a broad non-heterosexual community, intersect.
From the complexity of today’s fragmented and homogenizing world, we recognize that there is a process of colonization that has historically erased and denied us, making it difficult to recognize ourselves as part of an exclusive history. Likewise, we question and wonder: who wrote this history and for what purpose?
To talk about ancestral diversities from a historical point of view is extremely important because it implies rescuing and reconstructing the stories and memories of our existence, allowing us to weave a fabric, thus enabling us to look at ourselves again and know that we have always been here.
In this way, “ancestral diversities” is a possible form of self-representation and historical vindication around the sexual and affective dissidences that have inhabited Wallmapu and all of Abya Yala, but from the perspective of the First Nations. This, in turn, implies another important consideration: the right to name ourselves and perceive our existences outside of modern white gendered categories.
Christianity as a Dominant Belief System
Although Christianity operated as a normative social, cultural, legal, and political structure for different members of the population, it was also used as a tool of domination and punishment for specific groups considered “subordinate and impure,” mainly, indigenous people in Abya Yala.
Under this logic, non-Western cultural practices and expressions were criminalized, demonized, and condemned, resulting in a loss of our identity, spirituality, language, and territory. For this reason, it is necessary to review how the imposed belief systems have affected the loss of knowledge and permeated the construction of how we relate to each other.
Colonial oppression in Abya Yala involved the plundering and exploitation of bodies and territories through the legitimization of “civilized” and “uncivilized” classifications. To this end, Christian beliefs were used to establish a new ideological, political, and economic order.
It is under these Christian values that the argument of the “salvation” discourse was established and can be found in multiple colonial narratives. For example, the Spanish chronicler and Jesuit priest, Diego de Rosales (1878), wrote:
And as among the infidels there are enormous sins, such as infidelity, idolatry, speaking with the devil, witchcraft, enchantments, curses and sorcery, the heinous sin of yigamia, incest, without sparing mothers or sisters, drunkenness, fornication, the wrongs of innocents, animal sacrifices to the devil of animals, and what’s worse, of men and children, eat human meat, and having shops and butcher’s where it is sold in some places […]. (p. 451)
The imposition of these Western dogmas had (and has) the aim of punishing all forms of expression that do not conform to the Christian way of life, achieving control of the territories and bodies that inhabit them.
Christianity operated as a model of economic, social, political, and cultural organization in which the sole purpose of sexuality was procreation, being the “divine” plan (Cabrera, 2020). Any act that did not have this purpose was considered a criminal practice.
Among those with this burden one can find the sin “against nature”, directly related to the concept of “sodomy”. Alfonso X, King of Castile, who established the basis for the legal-moral understanding of this notion (Gonzáles, 2014), states the following in the “seven sacramental records” between the years 1256-1263:
Of those who commit the sin of unnatural lust. Sodomitical they refer to the sin that men commit by lying with each other against nature or natural custom. And because many evils are born of such sin in the land where it is committed, it is a thing that weighs heavily upon God, and brings bad reputation not only upon the perpetrators, but also upon the land where it is condoned.
(p. 664 – 665)
On the other hand, the act of “sodomy” that was introduced by the Spanish colonization was used, to a large extent, to point out and punish indigenous people who, from the colonizing point of view, symbolized the impure. So, although Spaniards could embody this sin, the punishment and reprisals were greater for indigenous groups that did not fit into the binary established as feminine or masculine.
This cultural framework brought by the colonizers constituted a colonial narrative that imposed itself by using indigenous cultural elements in order to evangelize Mapuche bodies and beliefs. An example of this was the creation of sermons in Mapudungun and the comparison of indigenous ceremonies with Catholic rituals, which favored the control of their lives, goods, and territories (Cumes, p. 62).
Sodomy: The Gulumapu Case
The persecution of “sodomy” occurred in different Latin American countries, which were accused of engaging in sexual practices that did not correspond to the Christian paradigm.
In the case of Gulumapu, it was no different. Spanish chroniclers and Jesuit testimonies describe how the colonial perspective assimilated bodies and practices that did not strictly adhere to the Western perception of feminine and masculine.
Luis de Valdivia (1621), in his text “Sermon in the Language of Chile”, written in Mapuzungun and Spanish, already pointed to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a lesson:
“[…] for the sin that cannot be named because it is so shameful, which is sodomy. Men went with men, as if they were women, and women with women, as if they were men, and men left women, and women left men, who did not know about faith, and five great cities perished, the main ones being Sodom and Gomorrah, and for this sin so great, with the great anger of God Almighty, fire came down from heaven […]” (pp. 12-13 )
Other statements attest to more direct encounters. In the chronicle Cautiverio feliz y razón de las guerras dilatadas de Chile (Happy captivity and reason for the extensive wars of Chile) by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán (1673), the figure of the machi* weye, from the colonial point of view, is given the cultural load of “faggot”.
And these are called hueies, and more properly whores, which is the true explanation of the name hueies. And these people do not wear underpants but a loincloth in front which they call punus, and they make themselves machis or healers, because they have a pact with the devil.
In Mapuche culture, the machi is an ancestral authority who has a direct link to the gods and has the ability to heal spiritual and physical illnesses. In this case, Nuñez de Pineda describes his encounter with a machi weye, who “did not comply with the parameters established by the West regarding gender binarism” (Calfuqueo, p. 85-86).
This one looked like Lucifer in his features, build, and costume. He was walking around without any underpants because he was one of those they called hueyes, that is to say, nefarious and among themselves they are considered vile for accommodating themselves to the role of women. Instead of breeches he wore a cuff, like the Indian women, and long T-shirts over the top; he had long hair, even though all the others wore it braided; his nails were so misshapen they looked like spoons; he was very ugly and had a cloud in one eye. Very small in stature, somewhat broad-shouldered and lame in one leg; just looking at him caused horror and fright.
The machi weye was associated with the feminine because he challenged the Western notion of gender. For the same reason, he was persecuted and rejected under the colonial category of “sodomite”, witch, and for his supposed desire for other men.
By contrast, glory and honor were associated with Christian imagery and powerful, masculine Spanish soldiers (Bacigalupo, p. 31).
Patriarchy and Its Implications for Contemporary Mapuche
Evangelization succeeded in establishing patriarchy as a belief system which, as Seba Calfuqueo points out in his work You Will Never Be a Weye, not only permeated the construction of the Chilean state, but also the Mapuche people and other indigenous organizations. In this sense, it is not unusual these days to come across people who claim that non-heterosexual identities and affections are the work of the “winka” (invader/settler).
However, different brothers, sisters, and siblings have begun to weave the fabric of our interwoven memories Cola and Mapuche, with the aim of recovering what has been taken from us: the possibility of seeing ourselves reflected in a past where the Mapuche and marika (queer) identities are not separated.
The text Ñümin/collect, raise, design. Notes from our tuwün/origin: the Rangiñtulewfü Collective by Ange Cayuman and Seba Calfuqueo (2023) takes a journey through the Mapuche denominations that account for “our roots beyond modern sex-gender identities” and which are vitally important to review.
For example, Cayuman and Calfuqueo (2023) draw on the concepts weye, weyetún, alka domo, kangechi and antü kuram from colonial archives which allow (although they contain the colonizer’s gaze) “to trace denominations for other forms of desire” (p. 1).
Thus, the authors record that alka zomo was a name noted in the dictionary Arte de la lengua general del Reyno de Chile (Art of the general language of the Kingdom of Chile) by the Spanish Jesuit priest Andrés Febres in 1765, which translates as “man woman”. In this regard, they explain that in Mapuzungun alka means “rooster” and dome is “woman”. Thus, it was also translated as “tomboy” or “hermaphrodite” (p. 2).
The concept kangechi was recorded in the book Gramática Araucana (Araucan Grammar) by the Judeo-German Capuchin missionary Felix de Augusta in 1903 and is translated as “other” (p. 2).
The last one, antü kuram, is found in the Linguistic-Ethnographic Mapudungun-Spanish-English Dictionary by the author María Catrileo in 1995 and is understood as “the egg without an embryo, in a figurative sense it refers to a homosexual” (p. 2).
This compilation involves the exercise of rescuing the memories of affections that have been erased, but emphasizing that we have the right to name ourselves and situate ourselves beyond current sex-gender theories.
And not because LGBTIQ+ struggles and resistance should be displaced. Rather, it is to argue that racist and colonial logic continues to be reproduced in these spaces and, therefore, it is necessary to look again at the territories we inhabit and their own sociocultural problems.
Tracking the footprints of our diverse memories is, among many other things, a way of forging a counter-history that differs from the universal political model that assumes that everything has its basis in the West. A counter-history that encompasses the different forms of violence that affect us beyond the notion of the gay person: marika and champurria (mixed person), stripped of language, land, and culture.
History shows that the Nation-States do not name us and there are those who still think that our identities are colonial inventions. In the face of this invisibilization and denial, several pu lamgen [hermanes] continue to direct knowledge around the complexity of indigenous bodies that inhabit Wallmapu and Abya Yala.
Likewise, and quoting Cayuman and Calfuqueo in their text Ñümin/recollect, raise, design, “we do not seek a special place to occupy in our communities”. We reclaim our existences and meet again to rebuild another memory, one where we return to our tuwun (origin).
Being Mapuche and marika is no longer a quandary, but a declaration: we are here, we exist in all of Abya Yala. From this stance, we move towards the search for concepts or denominations that represent us in the communities we inhabit and allow us to vindicate our existence from the historical memory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Bacigalupo, Ana. 2003. La lucha por la masculinidad de Machi: Políticas coliniales de género, sexualidad y poder en el sur de Chile. En Working Paper Series. Ñuke Mapuförlaget. https://mapuche.info/wps_pdf/baciga030300.pdf
Cabrera, Sebastían. 2020. Discursos de la sodomía en la guerra hispanomapuche: Entre prácticas e identidades nefandas en los siglos XVI y XVII. Tesis de pregrado, Universidad de Chile.https://repositorio.uchile.cl/bitstream/handle/2250/178983/Discursos-de-la-sodomia-en-la-guerra-hispano-mapuche.pdf?sequence=1
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