ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how Mapuche experience of urban space challenges historical and colonialist discourses and representations in relation to the city. It analyses how both access to and uses of specific places contribute to the making of Indigenous spaces in the city. The chapter also discusses the series of data collected in the field between 2008 and 2015. Despite evidence of the increased urbanisation of Mapuche, official censuses continued to assimilate the Indigenous population into a single peasant class during most of the twentieth century. Mapuche identity was only considered within the reserves, which had the effect of excluding the urban Mapuche population from the total count. The first Offices of Indigenous Affairs was created in 1996 in La Pintana, a peripheral and poor municipality of the Metropolitan Area of Santiago (MAS), which was promptly followed by other municipalities all over the country. In the MAS, for instance, no fewer than 24 OIAs had been created by 2014.
