SANTIAGO, Chile – Just before taking the stage, the teenage Indigenous rapper took a deep breath and composed herself with her eyes closed.
Her father reached out to pluck a sequin from his daughter’s eyelid, but the 16-year-old shrugged back with an embarrassed shrug. Then Millaray Jara Collio, or MC Millaray as the young rapper calls herself, spun off and exploded onto the stage with an animated rap about the presence of the Chilean military in Mapuche territory, the country’s largest indigenous group.
MC Millaray’s impassioned performance was delivered at a campaign rally in Santiago, the capital of Chile, a few months ago 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.
Despite being 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’m playing, I’m having fun and I’m laughing. On stage I say everything through rap. It frees me: if I get a microphone, I’m a different person.”
The new constitution – which would have empowered more than two million indigenous people in Chile, 80 percent of it are Mapuche to govern their own territories, have more judicial autonomy and be recognized as distinct nations within Chile – was solidly defeated in September.
But after that loss, MC Millaray, a rising star with more than 25,000 followers on Instagramis more determined than ever to mediate five centuries of Mapuche struggles against European colonizers.
“It’s not the end,” she said defiantly after the vote. “It’s the beginning of something new that we can build together.”
Moving between Spanish and Mapudungun, the indigenous language she would speak to her maternal great-grandmother, MC Millaray articulates this story with fast-paced, lyrical fury.
she Songs denounce environmental injustices, long for the protection of children’s innocence and honor fallen Mapuche. Most notably, it is demanding the return of the Mapuche ancestral lands known as Wallmapu, which stretch from Chile’s Pacific coast across the Andes to Argentina’s Atlantic coast.
Her single “Mi Ser Mapuche” or “My Mapuche Self”, released this year, combines trumpets with the “Afafan” – a Mapuche war cry. She sings:
“More than 500 years without giving up the fight; there are lands that we have reclaimed, but they are ours, our homeland; we continue to fight back, they will not defeat us.”
Since the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the 15th century, the lands once controlled by the Mapuche have been significantly reduced over the centuries through invasions, forced expulsions and purchases. The loss of traditional land accelerated in the 19th century, when Chile enticed European migrants to settle its south, promising to give them land it claimed was unoccupied but often settled by the Mapuche.
For some, it’s Chile’s greatest unexplained debt. For others, it’s a centuries-old dead end with no clear solution.
“It would be a dream for me to reclaim the territory,” said MC Millaray. “I want to devote my life to the ‘Weichán’,” she said, referring to the struggle to regain Wallmapu and traditional Mapuche values. “I want to defend what is ours.”
Millaray, which means “flower of gold” in Mapudungun, grew up with her younger brother and sister in La Pincoya, a slouchy barrio on the northern edge of Santiago where the walls are covered with colorful graffiti and hip-hop and reggaeton leaves are dotted with the ramshackle houses that spread up 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, wrote his first political rap in neighboring Conchalí.
As a child, Millaray said she looked forward more than anything to traveling to the Carilao community in Perquenco Township each summer to visit her maternal great-grandmother, spend afternoons splashing in a nearby river or maqui – Collect berries in a jar.
“When I arrive in Wallmapu I feel free and at peace,” she said. “I would experience what I was and what I represent, what flows through my veins,” she added, referring to the time she spent with her great-grandmother. “I realized how little I knew about my fight.”
At home in her Santiago barrio, it was the music that drew her attention most, and she attended the hip-hop workshops her parents — two rappers who met at a litter in La Pincoya — taught for organized by local children. “I grew up in a rap family,” Millaray said. “You were my inspiration.”
One afternoon when she was 5, her father, Alexis Jara, now 40, was rehearsing for a show while his daughter chatted on the bed next to him. As he performed that evening, Mr Jara spotted his daughter sobbing and feeling left out in the crowd.
He pulled her onto the stage and said, sniffling and his eyes swollen, “She’s transformed – pah! pah! — and started rapping with such vigor that she stole the limelight,” her father recalled. As her tears dried up, the 5-year-old addressed the crowd: “I represent La Pincoya, I want to raise my hands!”
“From that day on, we never took her off the stage,” her father said. “Now everything has turned upside down – it’s me who asks to join her!”
By the age of 7, Millaray had written and recorded her first album, Pequeña Femenina or Little Feminine, which she burned onto CDs to sell on public buses while traveling with her father.
When they made enough money, the two would jump down the back stairs of the bus and use the money to play arcade games or buy candy.
They still perform together – Mr. Jara an energetic whirl of pigtails and baggy dresses, his daughter calmer and more precise with her words. “Tic Tac”, the first song they wrote together, remains in their repertoire.
While still in elementary school, she received the impetus that strengthened her determination to embrace the struggle of her ancestors in her music and in her life.
In November 2018, her history teacher told the class that Camilo Catrillanca — an unarmed Mapuche man who was shot dead by police earlier this month in the municipality of Temucuicui in the south of the country — deserved his fate.
“I couldn’t keep quiet,” she recalled. “I stood up, burning with anger and said, ‘No, nobody deserves to die, especially for defending their territory.’ In 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 states of emergency were regularly renewed by right-wing and left-wing governments, was in one of its most tense phases in decades.
In addition to peaceful sit-ins by Mapuche activists on private property and in front of regional government buildings, this also happened Dozens of arson casesblamed on Mapuche resistance groups, and attacks on forestry companies.
At least seven killings were recorded in the conflict zone in 2022, including both Mapuche activists, such as a man on his way to a land occupation, and forest workers.
When the Chilean Interior Minister visited the community where Mr. Catrillanca was from in March, she was greeted with a roar of gunfire and rushed into a van.
In sometimes fierce Protests against economic inequality which exploded across Chile in October 2019 – triggered by a 4 cent increase in subway fares – Mapuche symbols and slogans were everywhere.
In Santiago’s main square, the protesters were greeted by a wooden statue of “chemical waste”, traditionally carved by the Mapuche to represent the dead. At the protests, Millaray rapped or sauntered among the protesters with her hand-painted blue flag featuring the “Wun Elf,” an eight-pointed star sacred in Mapuche iconography.
“We’re more visible now than when I was alive,” says Daniela Millaleo, 37, a singer-songwriter from Santiago who counts MC Millaray among her biggest inspirations. “It used to be only the Mapuche who marched for our rights, but now so many people are feeling our pain.”
After her grueling schedule of appearing 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 focused 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 its own sake,” she explained. “No matter the style, I always wonder what else I can say.”
