Minor geographies, everyday geographies: the construction of the national citizen in Chile Chico, Region of Aysén

Abstract

In the following paper we develop the idea that the national citizen is not only formed from the political center of the nation. The concept of the nation is produced and reproduced through daily practices of the everyday, through citizens’ engagements with the symbols and materialities of their surrounding territories. The local and the national are brought into dialogue in the context of educational, domestic (home) and public spaces, where things like flags, street art and commemorative ceremonies are engaged through their own cultural trajectories. Citizens living in the border town of Chile Chico (Aysén, Chile), which is only 14 kilometers away from Los Antiguos (Santa Cruz, Argentina), identify with aspects of the nation, as well as sharing spaces of common memory that go beyond the national level. Through these acts, citizens, in their minor and daily geographies, become both geopolitical agents that produce and reproduce a sense of belonging to the nation, as well as agents whose memory has given value to their own forthcoming, even before the nation and its borders had arrived.