Lauren: Los Mapuches.

Chile is a really homogenous country. While we've been here, Aneya and I have seen one gay couple, one questionable lesbian couple (it was questionable whether they were a couple), less than ten black people, and three Asians. You could go days without seeing someone who wasn't Latino, and that was over a month's time.

87 percent of the population here is Catholic, 11 percent is Protestant. So almost 100 percent of people are Christian.

But there is one major ethnic minority, the indigenous Mapuches, the largest indigenous group here. And there is a pretty real resistance from the Mapuche, especially in the south. Graffiti for Mapuche power isn't as common as it is on the coast or in the south, but there are still examples within the city of resistance, which can be seen in the above graffiti, which reads "Liberty to the Mapuche now!!".

In the south, especially in Temuco, the symbol of the Mapuche drum, the kultrun, is used as a symbol of the resistance, and can be seen all over town, quite often accompanied by something written in Mapudungun. There are also a number of lawyers in Temuco because of the litigation over things like land rights.

The Mapuche have a really sad history. They've been at war with Chileans since Chile started being settled, it's considered a 400 year war, and have sad songs. When we were in the pastoral area of the Araucania region near Temuco, a farmer who isn't Mapuche said the local Mapuche were pestering him, trying to get him to abandon his land by throwing stones into his field. If large companies go to the Araucania area to have factory farms, sometimes they will be driven out by the Mapuche. They're not kidding around about resistance.

Photo taken at San Antonio and Alameda.

-- Lauren