Abstract

Route 5, the Chilean segment of the Pan-American Highway, is a 3364 km-long motorway spanning four-fifths of the country’s length. This chapter examines Route 5 as a corridor where competing forms of memory appear through busts, plaques, statues, sculptures, murals, and open-space interventions. It argues that State-sponsored monuments—typically comprising buildings, infrastructure, statues, or plaques located in territories annexed by the Chilean state in the late nineteenth century—embody an elite-driven national modernising identity project that perpetuates an internal colonial gesture. These monuments are imbued with triumphalist and homogenising narratives of Chile’s past, framed as national heritage. In contrast, unofficial interventions and public art articulate conflict and diversity related to race, gender, class, and local identities, thereby creating a landscape of counter-memories along the highway. These counter-memories are interpreted as visual decolonial actions advocating for a form of visual democracy. By critically examining the interplay between official heritage together with public art, the chapter analyses the processes and implications of designating certain sites—but not others—as national monuments. Moreover, it questions the discourses embedded in both national heritage and in public art, framing these debates in terms of not only ‘rights to the city’ but also as a broader struggle to reclaim rights to public memory.