Issue 3 - July/August 2026

Set mostly in and around blocks of cheaply built, dictatorship-era housing on the southern outskirts of Santiago de Chile in the 1990s, Daniela Catrileo’s Piñen gives voice to the lives of working-class, urban Mapuche people living within what she terms the “periphery of the periphery”: the geographic, cultural, and linguistic edges of mainstream Chilean society into which the country’s colonial legacy has pushed them.

These stories are told in a nuanced, hybrid language that reflects the experiences of the characters they center. Words in Mapudungun appear naturally alongside Chilean Spanish without pausing to explain themselves, evoking relationships, histories, and social positions that are fully legible within the world of the text.

In my translation, I’ve tried to preserve this careful rendering by keeping key terms in their original languages, maintaining the text’s rapid shifts in tone and perspective, and retaining the narrative distance at which it holds the reader to avoid imposing an easy coherence where the original is ambiguous. If this version succeeds, it will be because it allows readers to encounter Piñen as a formally and politically demanding text that insists on the contradictions and complexities of urban Mapuche life in the shared and unequal city its characters call home.

Jacob Edelstein, January 2026, South Bay LA