‘Dark, buried, and very Indian’: Indigenous urban inhabitation and fluvial epistemic alternatives

In Latin America, urbanization is deeply linked to the dispossession of Indigenous people, and to processes of racialization that constructed the city as ‘white’ in antithesis to their territories and forms of life. Yet, the majority of Indigenous people now live in urban areas. In a context of racial inequalities and epistemic violence, how are Indigenous practices of urban inhabitation produced and given meaning? How is Indigenous knowledge shaped by the urban, and how does this shape the urban in turn?. To answer these questions, the article focuses on the Mapocho river running through Santiago, Chile. A key element of Indigenous geographies, the river is at the same time the border-line that shapes the city into segregated areas—with class and race historically defining this exclusionary urbanism. Moving from the collaborative research project MapsUrbe (2017-2021), the article addresses the relational engagement with this river in order to rethink urban inhabitation as multiple, frictional, and creative, marked by loss and dispossession as well as endurance. Centered on Mapuche knowledge making and territorial imagination, the paper takes seriously fluvial epistemics to reframe urban inhabitation as the entanglement of acts of traversing, subterranean streams and silent flowing, and sudden overflooding.