Nicholas Garcia Johnson

NICHOLAS JOHNSON, then a graduate student at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, was awarded a grant in August 2020 to aid research on ‘Emergent Citizenships: Chilean and Mapuche politics and belonging in the peri-urban Santiago (Chile),’ supervised by Dr. David Nugent. This dissertation project seeks to contribute to Indigenous studies, the anthropology of interculturalism, and citizenship studies by examining whether cross-racial interdependencies provide the conditions through which participants can debate and implement their visions of how to rectify historic inequalities and colonial legacies. It intends to do so through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on Mapuche (Indigenous) and Chilean (non-Indigenous) histories of mutual survivorship in peri-urban Santiago. Unlike the peri-urban neighborhoods in other parts of the world, neighbors have cooperated for mutual survivorship across racial lines through developing housing and organizations to manage shared resources in response to an inadequacy of neoliberal solutions to poverty. Research focuses two of 22 neighborhoods in which Chileans and Mapuche have a history of neighborhood organizing by using online mapping tools to visualize the transformations of community projects at 5-year intervals. Drawing on this mapped data to analyze interview transcripts and fieldnotes, this project seeks to test the hypothesis that Mapuche and Chileans’ history of neighborhood co-management has led to the emergence of intercultural citizenship practices that enable residents to articulate broader visions of how social and political life should be organized in Chile that contrast to the national discourses of neoliberalism.