Musical Practices and the Invention of a Tradition: The Case of the We Tripantü, the Celebration of the Mapuche New Year

The Mapuche people is the largest indigenous group in Chile and also has a significant presence in some provinces in Argentina. This article primarily addresses the Chilean Mapuche. The we tripantü celebration is a festival held around the second half of June that commemorates the beginning of the Mapuche year. In comparison with other collective Mapuche cultural practices, the we tripantü celebration usually brings together a larger number of people, systematically incorporates non-Mapuche participants, and receives significantly more attention in the media. This article addresses features of this festival, the role played by its musical practices, and how some aspects of identity have been articulated in the development of the festival’s activities. Furthermore, the article reviews how the we tripantü celebration was created in the 1980s by the ethnicization of the Christian celebration of St. John the Baptist despite the wide-spread belief that it corresponds to an ancestral indigenous gathering.