'Rompecabezas que le faltan piezas': National Space, Exile, and Race in Chilean Museums”

Keywords: cultural geography, nation, national space, Chile, centralization, mestizaje, exile, colonialism, museums, cultural resuorces.
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Two years after the Estallido Social protest movement, and in the face of a widely-rejected new constitution, Chileans are negotiating, re-writing, and defining what the “Chilean nation” means. Museums have long been noted for their ability to “exhibit the nation”, with various scholars both inside and outside the Chilean context recognizing the role museums play in constructing national identities (Anderson 1983; Gil 2016; Wei, 2018). This essay explores how ideas of national space are mapped onto practices of museum and cultural resource management practices in Chile. Drawing upon 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork (including long-form interviews and participant-observation) at distinct museum sites and archival research in Santiago and Viña del Mar, Chile, I explore three constructions of Chilean national space: Chile as a centralized nation with a capital and peripheral “regiones”, Chile as a nation scattered by exile and diaspora during the dictatorship, and Chile as a blanquimestizo settler-descendant nation. Combining methods from cultural geography, anthropology, and museum studies, this paper crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries to create an atlas of national space–as narrated, constructed, and felt by those managing cultural patrimony.