Funeral Rituals, Community, and Mobility in the Colonial City of Santiago, Chile

FAIN: FT-286108-22

Javiera Susana Jaque
Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA 24061-2000)

Research leading to a book on indigenous funeral practices in colonial Santiago, Chile, during the 16th through 18th centuries.

In my project entitled To Die Indio. Funeral Rituals, Community, and Mobility in the Colonial City I analyze the cultural and political implications of death in the colonial city of Santiago, Chile. I intend to demonstrate how death became a means of social mobility for subaltern groups that strategically used hegemonic forms of burial such as demanding in their testaments to be buried in privileged areas of the Cathedral, or making priests carry a high cross (cruz alta) during their funerals, which was a custom saved for Spaniards. Indigenous people negotiated the symbolic forms of dying within the mobile spatial configurations of the colonial cities. These peripheral subjects succeeded in passing as hegemonic subjects through this form of social and spatial mobility. My aim in this project is to trace the strategies in which marginal subject navigated the social fabric to unveil their subversive potential as a reaction to the imperial Spanish domain.