“Chilco” Is the Post-Colonial, Post-Capitalism Survival Story We Didn’t Know We Needed https://ift.tt/9QiOb1u
Hidden beneath subtle environmental and political manifests, Daniela Catrileo’s Chilco, translated by Jacob Edelstein, is an examination of female collectivity, indigenous identity, and colonization. It is set in a future where violence and erasure have drastically reshaped Chile and Chilean society. The main characters, Mari and her partner Pascale, make the decision to return to Chilco, Pascale’s beloved island. However, the decision unleashes a series of emotional, social, and even cultural entanglements. Mari, a mainlander, struggles to accept what her beloved Capital City has become – an urban center rife with political corruption, propaganda, deception, and mysterious sinkholes. Meanwhile, Pascale more and more feels the urge to answer the island’s, and the sea’s, call.
One cannot read Chilco without first acknowledging its structure. The brief chapters – Mari’s narratives – are poetically translated. The chapters’ brevity contributes to Chilco’s emotional grip, facilitating Mari’s recollections, reflections, and self-aware admissions. The brevity also compounds Mari’s vulnerability. Thus, each chapter is a miniature mosaic. Excerpts from archives, as well as historic visuals and maps, that pertain to the island of Chilco’s exploration and colonization act as brief intermissions between each chapter. These intermissions provide moments of pause and reflection, especially as Mari more and more explores society’s expectations and oppression of Chile’s indigenous peoples.
One of the most notable scenes exploring this topic is when Mari catches Laura, Mari and Pascale’s roommate, recording a conversation between Pascale and Pascale’s family. Mari states that the conversation “switched languages, between Mapudungun and Chilqueno.” The conversation is an “intimate space,” violated by Laura’s recording, and Mari responds violently: “I was furious. I screamed and insulted her and threw the recorder on the ground.” Nonetheless, Mari also recognizes that Laura’s so-called “curiosity” is inherently fueled by colonial expectations.
“Deep down, they continue to see us as museum pieces, a tourist anecdote, or worse, still their spiritual salvation. We have to live up their ancestral fantasies, as if thought and transformation exist only outside of our peoples.”
Mari’s observations resonate with current issues faced by Chile’s Mapuche peoples. In an article about reimagining gender affects and collectivity, Yeisil Pena Contreres and Rosemary Bruna Ramirez state, “The Mapuche are an Indigenous group who see the Chilean state as an ongoing settlerhood.” Chilco’s examination of Chile’s ongoing Indigenous oppression is, quite frankly, timeless thanks to Catrileo’s portrayal and Edelstein’s translation.
Mari’s own relationship with Pascale, too, can be interpreted as representative of a socio-cultural tension. Mari’s mainlander identity at times conflicts with Pascale’s islander identity. When Pascale poses to Mari that they permanently move to the island, Mari is torn between her love for the city and her family, and her love for Pascale. Most of the novel’s tension develops in the argument scenes portraying Mari and Pascale’s life together disrupted by Pascale’s desires. Thus, Mari symbolizes the urban – even civilization, with its busyness and city crowds – while Pascale symbolizes the pastoral and the coastal bucolic, embodying even the old spiritual practices that frequently separate the ancient from the modern.
Adding another layer to the island’s mystery is Mari’s lack of clarification regarding Pascale’s gender identity. Rather, Mari focuses on Pascale’s Indigenous identity and how that, more so than Pascale’s gender, defines Pascale. Mari’s depiction of and descriptions of Pascale are also significant to the novel’s conversations regarding Indigenous representation and beliefs in the context of Chilean culture and settlerhood. While a far-right and anti-transgender movement has grown significantly in Chile, Indigenous peoples like the Mapuche, according to the Los Angeles County National History Museum, have always accepted gender fluidity, with gender fluid individuals seen as a conduit of sorts to the spiritual realm.
Of course, one cannot read Chilco without acknowledging Mari’s own girlhood and womanhood experiences where women, not men, were most present, dominant, and even successful. Mari spends her life surrounded by the hard work and unspoken love of her female relatives. Together, the family manages a large business and works tirelessly to provide for one another. Unlike her mother, her grandmother, or her aunts, Mari is fortunate enough to eventually work in a museum, archiving, cataloguing, and documenting. In a sense, Mari’s education and profession break the seemingly perpetual cycle of socio-economic violence through which various family members have lived. Mari’s decision to move to the island disrupts her relationship with her family, but on Chilco – as Mari seeps deeper and deeper into a depression she cannot understand – those familial ties binding her to the mainland oddly strengthen, reinforcing the novel’s feminist foundations.
Chilco is a spellbinding fever-dream, swirling with socio-political conversations, mysteries, and self-reclamations. Like Katy Simpson Smith’s The Weeds, Chilco challenges colonial narratives by dissecting female oppression in male-dominated societies. Catrileo’s novel unpacks humanity’s relationship not only with nature, but also with itself, in a seemingly apocalyptic world where governments cannot be trusted and nature – even in its depleted form – may be humanity’s final salvation. It bears a deep message about preserving the natural world and its resources, and it possesses an even deeper message about the necessity of preserving one’s identity during the harshest of times. Consequently, Daniela Catrileo and Jacob Edelstein may have just offered the literary canon an end-of-the-world, post-capitalism, post-empire survival manual it did not necessarily expect but so desperately needs.
FICTION Chilco
By Daniela Catrileo, Translated by Jacob Edelstein
FSG Originals
Published July 15, 2025
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