Emma Sang in Public

(Okay…so really I sang with a group…but I knew that title would get your attention)

What song would you sing if you were in a different country and this host country asked you to do a “performance?”

The Star Spangled Banner…

….Pledge of Allegiance….any song from a Disney movie….

We were sitting in a bus arguing over which song to sing for our “performance” that would follow a performance that the students were going to put on for us. The students, many of whom we were living with for a week, and whose families are Mapuche (an indigenous group mostly found on the southern side of the South America--some people call this place Chile) go to the Escuela Municipal de Chapod--the local school for the community—Chapod (It’s about 9 hours by bus south of Santiago).

Since the Spanish arrived to Chile the 1500s…the Mapuche have been fighting to keep their land, their way of life, and their culture. For the past week we had the opportunity to live with a Mapuche family, learn their language, Mapudungun, and eat the incredible food that comes from their (very large) backyard.

So as the group sat on the bus…I couldn’t help but think that the song we choose is very symbolic. What would it look like if us…these US students…sang the US national anthem…the song the US coined as “official” after the US had murdered, moved and manipulated the indigenous people who were living in North America before the US arrived?

What would it look like if we choose a Disney song or the infamous Hannah Montana song, Party in the USA (I think…), (the character almost every child in Chile knows of)? What would it look like to choose a song that represents the neo-liberalism and globalization that is destroying the Mapuche culture (so that we watch TV with my host family here during dinner…and my host sister, knows of Hannah Montana and phrases in English, but barely knows the Mapuche language)?

So we all battle it out for a bit…and eventually choose this song: (this is from one of our many practice rounds on the bus)

This Land Is Your Land

….we even had a talk about the third verse that is often forgotten….and when we introduced the song to the school where we were “performing” we compared Woody Guthrie to Victor Jara. Talk about solidarity and bridge building.

It didn’t make the globalization go away. It didn’t make all the kids magically speak the language their grandparents speak fluently. It didn’t return them to the Rukas (the places the Mapuche used to use as homes). It didn’t bring the majority of the Mapuche back to the land (50% live in Chile’s major cities).

.

But it did allow for an exchange of resistance. It allowed for both words—the Chapod world and the SIT/US word—to show that we’re working towards a different and a more just world…where we can sing songs and share parts of our cultures that make us proud to be human beings.