Drums, dance and defiance in Santiago de Chile

This story was originally published in Ojalá.

SANTIAGO DE CHILE.– Late on a hot Wednesday afternoon in January, the sound of trumpets and drum beats called out residents of Santiago de Chile’s Barrio Yungay. They found a squad of masked figures, their papier-mache skulls distorted into exaggerated grins, leading a marching band down the street. A few dozen people in mismatched floral outfits danced a choreography of cumbia steps and kicks, followed by rows of musicians playing percussion, wind instruments and accordions.

The beat echoed from the drums of several chinchineros, percussionists who wear a bass drum on their backs, topped with a cymbal that they play with a strap attached to their foot, a trade passed down from generation to generation.

A skeleton bride blew kisses at passersby and then hid behind a tree to sneak up on a cluster of children. A young boy squealed with excitement. The Chinchintirapié Carnival School had come to invite the neighborhood to Saturday’s La Challa carnival.

When the Chinchintirapié take to the streets, they bring more than just song and dance: they reclaim the legacy of resistance that Chile’s institutions are determined to erase. They look up to Violeta Parra and Victor Jara, Chile's most famous singers of protest music, as patron saints. The members of the Chinchintirapié wear the faces of the disappeared on their sleeves. They embroider on their clothing the names of murdered activists, like Mapuche land defender Macarena Valdes, killed in 2016 after protesting a hydroelectric plant. As they parade, they toss leaflets of political prisoners into the air like confetti, and children run to pick them up.

A line of children gathered to watch the procession on a low wall outside of a high-rise apartment building. They yelled and applauded; cars stopped at the intersection honked their approval. As the sun set, the group returned to the school where they had begun the parade. An old lady in a long skirt has followed the troupe all the way back. “Goodbye, my dear,” she shouted to a skeleton figure dressed as a mother. “Saturday, Saturday!” 

“Bye, Skeleton, see you Saturday,” cried a little girl.

The beginnings

Rosita Jimenez is a slight, willowy woman with long hair and bright eyes. The 50-year-old founded Chinchintirapié in 2006 along with several other artists and musicians. A dancer and social worker, she had grown interested in Latin American carnival in the 1990s. At the time, Jimenez was studying African dance and working in La Pincoya, a neighborhood on the periphery of Santiago. During the so-called transition to democracy, the country saw the birth of the now-thriving street circus movement and its first Brazilian drum troupes, or batucadas. La Pincoya became one of the first communities to start its own carnival.

Carnival had been banned in Chile for almost two centuries. Although the celebration reached the country during the colonial period, in 1816 the Chilean government banned it for the “disorder and filth” that it caused. As a result, Chile lacks the carnival traditions of the rest of the Southern Cone, with the exceptions of the northern cities of Iquique and Arica, which were part of Peru when the government banned the festivities. The fragility of borders allowed them to maintain their Andean carnivals.

As she traveled to carnivals in neighboring countries, Jimenez fell in love with how the festivals brought communities together. She saw the thread that connected Salvador de Bahia’s samba schools in northeast Brazil, Iquique’s Andean dances and Buenos Aires’s murga porteña. Each celebration reinforced the cultural identity and history of the place that birthed it. Jimenez wanted to create a comparsa, or carnival troupe, that represented the Chilean working-class identity long prohibited by the state.

During her formal dance studies, Jimenez had taken just one semester of Chilean folk dance. As far as she knew, central Chile didn’t have an equivalent to Afro-Brazilian drums or Andean flutes, so, she asked herself, what would make a distinctly Chilean carnival troupe?

The answer came to her one evening in Santiago’s Plaza de Armas, just before Independence Day. A family of chinchineros were playing in the plaza. The police forced them to stop. Jimenez saw in the chinchinero, censored by the carabineros on the eve of the national holidays, yet another moment of repression. “That’s the drum we have to take back,” she thought.

A grant allowed Jimenez and her co-founders to fund the creation of the Chinchintirapié Carnival School. The name came from a portmanteau of chinchinero jargon: they call the strap that connects their foot with the cymbals the tirapié. The chinchineros would mark the rhythm of the band, an homage to the family banned from playing on Independence Day.

Carnival as resistance

More than 30 students, musicians and artists responded to the open call to participate in the School, which made its debut at Valparaiso’s Mil Tambores carnival in September 2006. Eighteen years later, the “Chinchín,” as the group calls itself, plays a wide repertoire of Latin American music, from cumbia to cueca to reggaeton.

The school is organized into committees and troupes of musicians, dancers and masked figures. They follow a rigorous rehearsal schedule, meeting up to three times a week during carnival season. No one pays to participate; anyone can join, and all decisions are made in an assembly.

“You do a lot of free work. The people who are there want to be there,” says Clau Quipin, who joined the Chinchin in 2012 as a figurine and now dances. “Carnival is super subversive. It always has been.”

The line between a party and a protest often blurs. The Chinchín typically play in areas where residents have little access to music and culture. “In a lot of the places we play, it’s the first time children hear a brass instrument,” says Magín Moscheni Sossa, who joined the school as a masked figure when it was founded.

In addition to carnival celebrations, the group often plays at protests, marches and other community events. Each June they participate in the We Tripantu Mapuche solstice celebration. They’ve faced their fair share of repression on the streets. During one Labor Day march, they were kettled by police on the Alameda. “We were in formation, and we started to stay, ‘hold firm, hold firm, don’t provoke them!’,” recalls Moscheni. “The line of police officers left. They didn’t know what to do with us. We were dancing and all dressed up, and the police left.”

On other occasions, they haven’t had as much luck: they’ve faced tear gas and water cannons; some have been arrested for dancing and singing in public. “We put our bodies on our line,” Moscheni says. The masked figure is a shared body that you give over to the street.”

La Challa

On Saturday afternoon, as the 6pm start time approached, spectators flooded the sidewalk outside the Colegio Alemana. They readied their bags of confetti to toss over the comparsas. Brass bands followed up samba troupes, Andean Tinku dancers and Bolivian caporales with bowler hats and sequined dresses. A little girl in a tulle skirt attacked the musicians spraying silly string into the air.

The Chinchintirapié, now costumed in matching red-and-black outfits, brought up the rear of the procession. The skeletons shimmied and teased the spectators, who laughed and danced along with them. By the time the band turned the corner, a crowd trailed behind them. They joined in the chorus of “Arauco tiene una pena,” Violeta Parra’s poetic protest song. As darkness fell, the rebellious beat of the chinchinero’s drum echoed through the streets of Barrio Yungay.