Date/Time: Wednesday 27th November 2019, 4:00-5:00pm

Venue: Barbara Strang Teaching Centre, 1.46

The image of an empty Andean high plateau in northern Chile has developed around geographical representations and imaginary linked to the nation's consolidation process. In this process, the Cordillera de Los Andes, became a geographical reference for the Whitening of national identity. How was the Cordillera de Los Andes del Norte represented in the Chilean national imaginary? Using cultural artifacts such as newspapers and secondary sources of information we provide an account of such representation at different times. The research shows the installation of a common sense that linked the Andean mountains with the attributes of a desert, the 'unhabited Atacama', 'the most arid desert in the world', as a space for exploitation, and as a space removed from people's daily life. This narrative and representation has contributed to the emptying and current peripheralization of the Chilean highlands. It is the purpose of this research to warn about the contradictions and paradoxes of such representations of the Chilean Northern Andes because its strategic character has been enhanced or made invisible, depending on who observes it.