Guallatire: Negotiating Aymara Indigeneity and Rights of Ownership in the Lauca Biosphere Reserve, Northern Chile

My dissertation explores a multilayered landscape of contestation at the Aymara borderlands of Guallatire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with guallatire単os in this Andean locality, I focus on how both the history of border institutionalization and the creation of the Lauca Biosphere Reserve impacted ethnicity processes and indigenous ownership in the highlands. I examine the politics of indigeneity as a mobile social formation and transnational field of governance, subjectivities and knowledges, along with notions of heritage shaped by the materiality of property. While struggling for cultural recognition and economic redistribution, guallatire単os have been confronted with a neoliberal state apparatus and violent mechanisms of government, including contradictory legislation which consequently has fragmented traditional native territories and communities, privatized land and water rights, and ultimately invisibilized Indigenous Peoples. However, the free market model has also shaped contested terrains between public and private sectors in the Lauca, paradoxically weakening the role of the state and causing friction among the various stakeholders involved in the Biosphere Reserve. By studying a series of state-driven `participatory meetings' for indigenous and touristic development, I conclude that participatory governance in the Lauca territory has challenged democratic practices and created spaces for indigenous recognition and political representation. Different strategies of resistance are continually performed by the Aymara to negotiate their ethnic identities and cultural boundaries in Northern Chile.Ph.D