Contact zones, safe houses and the family language politics of Chedungun maintenance

I conceptualise the family as a politicised space with its own language politics to explain the maintenance of Chedungun in a Pewenche family in southern Chile. I focus on power struggles at play, discursively and in practice, to control language diversity and its meanings at home vis-à-vis the Chilean nation-state. To explain this, I resort to the concepts of ‘contact zones’ and ‘safe houses’ (Pratt, M. L. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession. 33–40; Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial Eyes. Routledge), conceptualised as sociolinguistic scales. This family language politics is grounded in a memory of the lived experience of the language politics in asymmetrical intercultural encounters in the contact zone (Chilean society and institutions) and rests in the articulation of spaces and relational networks (the safe house) under their control and in an understanding of the mobility of young people. Constitutive of this language politics are an awareness of the dominance of Spanish, a parent-centred bilingual language socialisation, counter-hegemonic appropriation of Spanish, a resignification of bilingualism and the creation of language dichotomies to assert an ethnic identity and intergroup difference. The language politics in this family can be seen as part of the micropolitics of resistance to Chilean colonialism, which, despite not subverting hierarchies, subverts the meanings of subordination, contributing to the maintenance of Chedungun.