Abstract

This paper discusses the socioecological dimension of inequality in Chile, through the analysis of a territory with a high environmental degradation: the indigenous communities located around the Boyeco rubbish dump. Through an ethnographic methodology carried out between 2014 and 2016, the concept of environmental suffering is recovered to study the ways in which indigenous subjects interpret the relationships of socio-environmental inequality in which they are involved. The article shows how the systematic installation of environmental loads in indigenous territories (the case of the IX region) is a form of a material and symbolic expulsion of the territory, highlighting the importance of understanding the narratives that indigenous subjects elaborate about it and its relationship with the dynamics of the conflict