SANTIAGO, Chile – Just before taking the stage, the native teen rapper took a deep breath and calmed herself down, eyes closed.
Her father reached out to pluck a sequin from his daughter’s eyelid, but the 16-year-old flinched and shrugged in embarrassment. Then Millaray Jara Collio, or MC Millaray as the young rapper calls himself, turned away and exploded onto the stage with an animated rap about the presence of the Chilean army in the territory of the Mapuche, the country’s largest indigenous group.
MC Millaray’s impassioned performance was delivered a few months ago at a campaign event in Santiago, Chile’s capital, and just a week before the country was due to vote on a new constitution. If approved, the Constitution would have guaranteed some of the most far-reaching rights for indigenous peoples around the world.
Although she was too young to vote in the referendum, MC Millaray was one of hundreds of artists campaigning for the new charter.
“I’m two people in one,” she said after her performance. “Sometimes I feel like a little girl – I play, I have fun and I laugh. On stage I say everything through rap. It liberates me: when I get a microphone, I am a different person.”
The new constitution – which would have empowered Chile’s more than two million indigenous people 80 percent of whom are Mapuche, to govern their own territories, have greater judicial autonomy and be recognized as separate nations within Chile – was soundly defeated in September.
But in the wake of that loss, MC Millaray, a rising star with over 25,000 followers on Instagramis more determined than ever to convey five centuries of Mapuche struggle against European settlers.
“This is not the end,” she said defiantly in the aftermath of the vote. “It’s the start of something new that we can build together.”
Switching between Spanish and Mapudungun, the native language she would speak with her maternal great-grandmother, MC Millaray articulates that story with rapid, lyrical fury.
Hair songs condemn environmental injustices, yearn to protect the innocence of childhood and honor the fallen Mapuche. Above all, she calls for the return of the Mapuche ancestral land known as Wallmapu, which stretches from the Pacific coast of Chile and across the Andes to the Atlantic coast of Argentina.
Her single “Mi Ser Mapuche” or “My Mapuche Self”, released this year, combines trumpets with the “afafan” – a Mapuche battle cry. She sings:
“More than 500 years without giving up the fight; there are lands we have reclaimed, but they are ours, our home; we will continue to resist, they will not beat us.”
Since the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, the land once controlled by the Mapuche has shrunk considerably through centuries of invasion, forced relocations and purchases. The loss of traditional land accelerated in the 19th century when Chile enticed European migrants to settle in the south, promising to give them land it claimed was unoccupied but often populated by the Mapuche.
For some, it is Chile’s largest outstanding debt. For others, it is an age-old impasse with no clear solution.
“For me it would be a dream to recapture the territory,” said MC Millaray. “I want to give my life to the ‘weichán’,” she said, referring to the struggle to reclaim Wallmapu and traditional Mapuche values. “I want to defend what’s ours.”
Millaray, meaning “flower of gold” in Mapudungun, grew up with her younger brother and sister in La Pincoya, a gritty neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Santiago, where the walls are splattered with colorful graffiti and blare hip-hop and reggaeton. of the dilapidated houses that stretch against the hills.
The area has a strong rap tradition. In the 1980s, the Panteras Negras, one of Chile’s first hip-hop groups, formed in nearby Renca, and Andi Millanao, better known as Portavoz, one of Chile’s best-known hip-hop stars, first wrote his fiery political rap in neighboring Conchalí. .
As a child, Millaray said she would do anything she could to travel south every summer to the Carilao community in the Perquenco community to visit her maternal great-grandmother, spend afternoons in a nearby river, or pick maqui berries in a jar. collect.
“When I arrive in Wallmapu I feel free and peaceful,” she said. “I would learn what I was and what I represent, what runs through my veins,” she added, referring to the time she spent with her great-grandmother. “I realized how little I knew my fight.”
Back home in her Santiago barrio, it was the music that caught her attention the most, and she attended the hip-hop workshops that her parents—two rappers who met at a party in La Pincoya—would host for local children. “I grew up in a rap family,” said Millaray. “They were my inspiration.”
One afternoon when she was 5, her father, Alexis Jara, now 40, was rehearsing for a show, with his daughter on the bed next to him. When he performed that night, Mr. Jara saw his daughter sobbing in the crowd, feeling left out.
He pulled her onto the stage and, sniffing and puffy-eyed, “She transformed— pah! pah! — and started rapping with such vigor that she stole the spotlight,” her father recalled. As her tears subsided, the 5-year-old addressed the audience: “I represent La Pincoya, I want hands in the air!”
“From that day on, we never took her off stage,” said her father. “Now everything is turned upside down – I ask to join her!”
By the time she was 7, Millaray had written and recorded her first album, ‘Pequeña Femenina’ or ‘Little Feminine’, which she burned to CDs to sell on public buses while out with her father.
When they had earned enough money, the two would jump down the back stairs of the bus and grab the money to play arcade games or buy candy.
They still perform together – Mr. Jara an energetic swirl of braids and baggy clothes, his daughter more calm and precise in her words. “Tic Tac”, the first song they wrote together, remains in their repertoire.
While still in elementary school, she received the shock that would strengthen her determination to incorporate the struggles of her ancestors into her music and life.
In November 2018, her history teacher told the class that Camilo Catrillanca — an unarmed Mapuche man shot dead by police that month in the Temucuicui community in the south of the country — had earned his fate.
“I couldn’t keep still,” she recalled. “I got up, burning with rage, and said, ‘No, no one deserves to die, especially defending their territory.’ At that moment I defended what I thought, and it changed me.”
In late 2021 and into the first half of 2022, the conflict in the Mapuche territories, where a state of emergency was regularly renewed by both right and left governments, was in one of its most tense periods in decades.
In addition to peaceful sit-ins by Mapuche activists on private land and at regional government buildings, there were also dozens of cases of arsonresponsibility for which was claimed by Mapuche resistance groups, as well as attacks on forestry companies.
In 2022, at least seven murders were recorded in the conflict zone, with victims including both Mapuche activists, such as a man on his way to a land occupation, and forest workers.
When Chile’s interior minister visited the community where Mr. Catrillanca came from in March, she was greeted with the crackle of gunfire and quickly tucked away in a van.
In sometimes violent protests against economic inequality which exploded across Chile in October 2019 – offset by a 4 cent increase in subway fares – Mapuche symbols and slogans were ubiquitous.
In Santiago’s main square, protesters were greeted by a wooden “chemamüll” statue, traditionally carved by the Mapuche to represent the dead. During the protests, Millaray rapped or walked among the protesters with her hand-painted blue flag emblazoned with the “Wünelfe,” an eight-pointed star sacred in Mapuche iconography.
“We’re more visible now than in my life,” says Daniela Millaleo, 37, a singer-songwriter from Santiago who credits MC Millaray as one of her biggest inspirations. “It used to be only the Mapuche who marched for our rights, but now so many people feel our pain.”
After her grueling schedule of performing at campaign events on behalf of the failed constitutional effort — as well as a trip to New York to sing in Times Square as part of Climate Week NYC — MC Millaray is now focusing on recording new material.
“I want to reach more people, but I want every verse to have a message — I don’t want to make music for the sake of it,” she explained. “No matter what the style, I always wonder what else I can say.”