Imaginative technologies of (im)mobility at the “end of the world”

• Main Author: Salazar, Noel B.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: Dutch
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: mobility; Chile; immobility; imaginaries; migration; Inaccessible Island; Pacific; Patagonia
• Online Access: https://lirias.kuleuven.be/handle/123456789/322066

Chile’s geographical remoteness – a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the Atacama Desert and the icebergs of Patagonia – has largely defined the imaginaries people share about this country. Despite its historical image as finis terrae (the end of the world), many migrants found their way to these isolated peripheral lands. Thanks to new means of transport and communication, Chile nowadays is as exposed to the global circulation of people, objects and ideas as the rest of the world. Based on a creative combination of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces how old imaginaries about Chile as an inaccessible island play an instrumental role in how contemporary Chileans participate in and frame their perceived exclusion from a plethora of new transnational mobilities, regardless of whether they have the actual means and freedom to cross (imaginary and real) boundaries. Although increasingly under outside pressure, the value of immobility remains at the core of the Chilean social imaginary, geo-politics, and cultural life. The “image management” of the rescue operation of the 33 San José miners who were trapped for 69 days in a collapsed copper-gold mine in the Atacama desert offers a perfect example to analyze the politics of (im)mobility in Chile and beyond. The findings illustrate how mobility imaginaries and practices emerge as sources constitutive of cultural meanings beyond being a mere extension or transfer of them, and how their manipulation effectively influences how Chilean citizens perceive their own and other’s (im)mobility. status: published