Chilco Daniela Catrileo 9781917260145

A near-future tale about love, life, and friendship in a world that's falling apart.

Chilco is the name of Pascale's home island. It is also the Mapudungun word for fuchsia: a word that evokes tropical lushness, wetness, the deep greenness of the forest. Pascale's partner, Marina, grew up in the vertical slums of Capital City, a place scarred by centuries of colonialism and now the ravages of feckless developers. Every day the couple fear a sinkhole will open up and take with it another poor neighbourhood, another raft of desperate refugees from the hinterlands: the indigenous, the poor, who are toiling for an all-consuming machine that is devouring the earth from beneath their feet. When they finally flee the collapsing city to live in Chilco, are they escaping from the crushing weight of centuries of colonial repression that have eroded indigenous memories, language, and culture, or are they merely stepping into a twisted, lush new version of it? From her first days in this place where she's supposed to feel safe and at home, Marina can't avoid the feeling that everything is decaying around her-there is a smell of putrefaction in the air that no one except her can detect; there are seismic rifts that the political cruelties of the times have opened up in her own relationship with Pascale; and she is haunted by insistent memories of her past. In Chilco , Daniela Catrileo's baroque, tropical jeremiad, the wounds of capitalism and empire inflict themselves on the person and on the land, but linger most devastatingly in language and memory. Indigenous Mapudungun and Quechua words, history, and cosmology form the chorus to this tropical fever dream of life, love, death, and friendship.

Daniela Catrileo was born in Santiago de Chile in 1987 and is a Mapuche writer. She's also an artist, a philosophy lecturer and an activist committed to the rights of Chile's indigenous population. She is a member of the Colectivo Mapuche Rangintulewfu and part of the editorial team for Yene , a digital magazine featuring art, writing, and critical thought from across Wallmapu and the Mapuche diaspora. She has published two collections of poems: Rio herido (Wounded River) (2016) and Guerra florida (Flourishing War) (2018), for which she was awarded the Premio Municipal de Literatura by the city of Santiago de Chile in 2019; two chapbooks: El territorio del viaje (The Journey's Territory) (2017, 2022) and Las aguas dejaron de unirse a otras aguas (The Waters Ceased to Join Other Waters) (2020); and a book of short stories: Pinen (2019), forthcoming from Charco Press in 2026. Chilco is her first novel and her first book to be translated into English.

Jacob Edelstein is a translator from the South Bay of Los Angeles, California. His recent translation work has been featured in Latin American Literature Today , The Columbia Review , The Southern Review , The Hunger Mountain Review , and elsewhere. His translation of Patrimonio by Santiago Arau was published in 2023, and his translations of Monserrat Sepulveda's !Hasta mi mama! and Daniela Catrileo's Pinen are forthcoming.

"Chilco is one of the most thrilling and urgent novels I've read this year - a searing portrait of Indigenous resilience and radical imagination." -Morning Star

"Chilco is moving, keen, and disruptive; a beautiful novel about origin, identity, love, and the land we belong to." -Monica Ojeda , author of JAWBONE

"A song to the resistance of urban indigenous diasporas who continue to imagine the possibility of return." -Gabriela Wiener , author of SEXOGRAPHIES and NINE MOONS

"A book of fascinating imagination that invites us to open the windows, at this precise moment, to seek out the distant signs of hope." -Marco Aviles , author of I AM NOT YOUR CHOLO

"These pages pulse with grief, but also with a burning desire to confront the wounds of colonialism and reclaim both language and territory." -Liliana Colanzi , author of YOU GLOW IN THE DARK

"A novel that interrogates roots, identity and territory in the deepest sense." -La Tercera

"Chilco weaves together decolonized territories, both in language and in social and emotional relations - and even among the bodily senses." -Reforma

"A beautiful yet harsh political novel that depicts diversity through a baroque and expressive language." -Pagina/12

"Powerful... an invitation towards new ways of reading what is happening and what is being written in the continent." -El Pais

"Catrileo sketches out a poetic and political map... of Andean territory." -La Nacion

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Praise for Daniela Catrileo

• Winner of the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize (2024).