Paper Short Abstract:

The Yemanyá Festivity performed by the Chilean Afrodescendant People, has developed strategies to construct counter-narratives of memory. We will analyze the ways in which the official historical memory is disputed, from the rescue of the repertoire of family, collective and embodied memories.

Paper Abstract:

The former President of the Chilean Republic, Ricardo Lagos, at the Regional Preparatory Conference of the Americas against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (2000), declared: "there are no black people in Chile because they died of cold". This episode is crucial for the national Afro-descendant movement, due it served as an incentive for awareness-raising, self-identification and visibility actions, which led to the recognition of the Chilean Afro-descendant Tribal People in 2019 (Law 21.151).

The denial of the Afro-descendant presence in Chile responds both to a colonial apparatus of power and to internal colonialism, reinforced by the nation-state after the Pacific War (1879-1883), in which Peruvian and Bolivian territories were annexed, with a high presence of descendants of the transatlantic trade, whose identity was "bleached" during the post-war "Chileanization" process.

Our presentation is located in Arica, frontier city next by Peru and epicenter of that historical stage, to analyze the Yemanyá Festivity performed by the Afro-descendant community since 2010, in addition to the practices of the continental diaspora. However, due to the particularities of the territory, in principle this does not related with the Yoruba cult, but rather a strategy of visibility, to shows a continuity in the historical memory, from a rooted repertoire into the family, collective and embodied memory, which have allowed the construction of counter-narratives, in the community and outside it, which are still in dispute.