“You taught me language; and my profit on't.” Translation, differential authorship, and frictions as champurria collaborations in indigenous and anthropological writing

Building on an ongoing dialogue with co-editors Claudio Alvarado Lincopi and Roberto Cayuqueo Martínez, this article explores the process that redefined roles and relationships with and through writing. It investigates multivocal representations and collaborative writings, interrogating the possibilities and challenges of divergent positionalities in methodologies and epistemologies of co-creation that are simultaneously Indigenous, academic, ethnographic, and deeply engaged. “Performing the Jumbled City: Subversive Aesthetics and anticolonial indigeneity in Santiago de Chile” (MUP, 2022) results from a 4-year collaborative research project involving Mapuche activists, artists, and scholars. The book, structured as a map of Santiago, chronicles the Indigenous urban diaspora, emphasising creative and political acts of place-making. Connected to a website housing audio-visual materials, the volume experiments with multimodality, collective writing, and shared authorship. Editorial work and writing involved extensive review, feedback, and translation between individual and collective creation, and negotiations around choices of language, style, format, and forms of representation.