Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between population mobility, rural-urban migration, kinship practices and collective identification in the Codpa Valley, located in the Arica Precordillera in northern Chile. The research methodology combined the extended case method and multi-sited ethnography. Between 2012 and 2017, we carried out ethnography in urban and rural spaces through which members connect the city of Arica with the locality. Based on the results of the research, we show that, in a context of high rural-urban migration that characterizes the indigenous territories diagnosed as depopulated, kinship practices have played a central role in the configuration of a translocal identification of the population, revealing a specific sociocultural logic associated with the locality and its construction of alterities in the (trans)national border area.