Reclaiming roots on land—and at sea—in central Chile

Natalia Guerrero on the rocks above the sea in Pichilemu, Sixth Administrative District, Chile. Photo: Natalia Guerrero

Interview • Claudia Hernández and Claudia Cuellar • February 8, 2024 • Leer en castellano

Chile's Pacific coast, which extends for more than 6,400 kilometers, has been home to Chango, Lafkenche, Chono, Yagane, Kaweskar, Selk'nam and other Indigenous peoples since time immemorial.

Genocidal practices perpetrated by Spanish colonizers and continued by the Chilean state have taken a horrific toll on these peoples. Official accounts suggest they are part of the past; and that their lifeways, knowledge and practices have long since disappeared.

In late December, we met Natalia Guerrero in Pichilemu, a coastal town 200 kilometers southwest of Santiago. Born and raised in Pichilemu, Guerrero is a member of the Chango people. She is spokesperson for the National Council of the Chango People in the O'Higgins region of Chile’s Sixth Administrative District.

Founded in 2020, the Council was born of Chango struggles to defend the maritorio [a word combining mar —sea—and territory] and their right to self-determination as a people. "For us, the maritorio is not just the sea, but the sea and land and their complex interconnection," Guerrero said. "We are in a zone of interfaces, which is full of vital biological and ecological processes." 

Council members began to engage the Chilean state politically in 2020, the same year they produced a documentary called, in English, Millennial Algae Collectors: The Return of the Ancestors of the Changos and the Sea People of Cardenal Caro.

Since the 1960s, Pichilemu has been known internationally as Chile’s "surf capital." Its streets are dotted with signs and directions in English for the benefit of foreign surfers. We walked a couple of blocks through the city with Guerrero until we reached Infiernillo beach, where we spoke while looking out at the sea. 

Behind us was a ruca [house], surrounded by a seaweed garden drying in the sun. In it, a family of mareros—people who live and work at sea—were assembling suitcase-like baskets of cochayuyo. Cochayuyo is an edible seaweed abundant in the area. It is part of Chile’s traditional cuisine and a one of few exports oriented toward China that continues to be harvested and gathered according to artisanal practices.

In addition to following in the lifeways of her marera ancestors, Guerrero is a sociologist and researcher, which has complemented her own process and solidified her decolonial and Indigenous perspective. 

Her knowledge and skills remain rooted in Pichilemu, despite the colonial dispossession of her great-great-grandmothers. Today, forest fires threaten the area, as do industrial logging, sea privatization and, more recently, luxury real estate developers, who have invaded the region with the support of Chile’s political oligarchy. The sense of devastation is palpable.

In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the broad outlines of these paths and processes with Guerrero.

Claudia Hernández: Can you tell us about this coastal area, part of Chile’s Sixth Administrative District, and its recent history?

Natalia Guerrero: The area is predominantly rural. Seventy-five percent of the land that borders the Pacific Ocean to the west is held in large rural properties or estates. Since the civil-military dictatorship [1973-1990], these estates have been dedicated to pine and eucalyptus monocrops. These are foreign species that have radically altered the amount of water available to sustain other life forms. 

The people who have lived and worked within these large estates for generations have been forcibly expelled. This has been taking place since the time of the encomiendas, the clearing of Indian villages, and what has been called "inquilinaje" [a feudal system of labor control].

The contemporary mode of exploitation is a prolongation of violent forms of colonial control and usurpation of identity, through which, via cultural and ideological miscegenation, the ancestral inhabitants of this area have been discouraged from recognizing their ties to local native peoples. In the process of assimilation, they were called peasants, artisanal fishermen, cowboys, and so on.

In fact, the seafarers, mareros, and Changos are descendants of Indian fisherpeople, and they continue their way of life today, all while self-organizing. The history of these ancient peoples is full of legal battles against large landowners, all of which have played out in a context of sharp asymmetries of power. 

Recently authorities have started subdividing the land so as to sell our ancestral territories to luxury real estate developments. Developers come to urbanize nature, causing untold damage while aggravating the climate crisis and increasing the likelihood of disasters.

An eco-capitalist conservation discourse accompanies this process and, with it, the creation of nature sanctuaries by foundations and NGOs, especially to protect what they call "surfing areas." 

In reality, this is a front for changes in land use that allow developers to urbanize and build houses in the middle of the best lands, which have historically been used for agricultural, livestock and fishing activities in our territory.

Cochayuyo algae laid out to dry in Pichilemu, Sixth Administrative District, Chile. Photo: Natalia Guerrero

CH: Can you tell us more about the traditional way of life in this maritorio?

NG: The people who live here mainly work at sea, but not exclusively. In this area, there is a long history of relating to nature in a complementary way. 

It is normal here to be fishermen, gatherers and hunters, mainly on the sea but also on land. Small farms and animal husbandry complement these activities.

The economic and political crises of the 1980s led to hunger and the expulsion of traditional inhabitants from the interior of estates and towns. Many of those who had been dispossessed from the sea into large estates returned to the coast and began to work there once again. 

Today there are seventeen settlements along 142 km of coastline. People travel to these settlements and stay for the period when the sea is calmer and warmer. 

Mostly in December, but also in September, people travel from the urban area to the rural zones, where the rucas are. While they’re there, they live and work from the sea, collecting shellfish and different types of seaweed, mainly cochayuyo. They collect the seaweed that is pulled up by the movement of the sea and manage it through selective and seasonal pruning once it is fully grown. 

In western terms, these ecological landscape and species management strategies rely on what is known as local or traditional ecological knowledge. 

One strategy that was inherited from the ancients is the division of the maritorio into plots. The term "plots" is used by the local mareros to identify rocky areas, usually located near the breaks, where there is algae like huiro, chasca, cochayuyo, as well as other types that don’t have commercial value but that are extremely important to the ecosystem. 

These macroalgae coexist with other minor species and together form what are sometimes called brown macroalgae meadows. The kind of algae that thrives depends on the location of the plot, the type of substrate, the cleanliness of the rock and the conditions of each area.

These practices, re-introduced over a period of more than 40 years, has made cochayuyo one of the most abundant species in the areas that are considered plots. This has improved the quality of life for many seafarers and their family clans as [these harvesting methods began to bear fruit] from 2010 onward. They began to harvest more cochayuyo, which led to an increase in the amount of blue sea forests in our area. 

They don’t use industrial methods and, although this process is done by humans, it unfolds in the context of a long-standing biocultural memory that—through trial and error—has been generating knowledge about the impact of human intervention on marine ecosystems, which themselves constantly seek equilibrium. 

Human beings, with their hands and tools [a knife], prune the mature algae, creating spaces for smaller sprouts to grow. Not everything is cut; seed reservoirs always remain.  

CH: Can you tell us a little more about how you began to recognize yourselves as Chango people, and why? 

NG: We’re able to self-identify as Indigenous Chango people, and recognize ourselves as descendants of ancient Indian fisherpeople, because our ancestors fought back and held onto ancient ways of life. 

Everything was taken from us. This zone, the central zone, is where Chile was founded: the encomiendas, the doctrines, the clearing of Indian villages, in which the church supported the violent processes of assimilation. They were forced to change their own ancestral beliefs, and not through democratic dialogue. There was an attempt to eradicate traditional spirituality, there were witch-hunts, persecution and punishment for continuing to believe in the spirits of nature.

In my case, I never felt Chilean. In my family, the vulgar kind of Chileanness that is instilled in school always felt alien. I went to school but I always wanted to return to the place where I grew up, which was on the shore, on the beach, free. 

We don't want this land to be filled with luxury homes or condominiums. We want to sustain nature and hopefully restore what has been destroyed. 

In that sense, there is a clash of visions with the people who come from the city with a western conservationist outlook, which sees nature as a commodity and understands human beings as individuals who are separate from nature. This is also linked to social class: they are the rich, the descendents of the colonizers who came here 500 years ago. 

Through our process, we have resisted the neoliberal fishing policies implemented since the return of democracy, and have made it clear that the maritime practices that work are those that have always been exercised and respected by the people of the sea—by the Changos—who have understood, inhabited and deciphered this landscape since time immemorial.

Our governance and governability are essentially anti-extractivist. This implies protecting and defending what exists as part of our vital habitat. It also means we distance ourselves from those who neither preach nor practice a harmonious relationship with all the life forms that surround and accompany us.