Decolonizing South – South Migration in Santiago De Chile: The Role of Images in the Experience of Dwelling the City.

Chile has tripled the number of migrants entering the country in recent years, becoming a main destination for migrants seeking to improve their living conditions. This increase involves not only a larger migrant population living in the country, but also challenges for the dynamics of the cities and living conditions of the people. At the same time, migrants are regarded in the public debate as the main source of violence and organized crime rising. Thus, the urgency to engage with “the Colonial” permeating the contemporary world is especially relevant today. We explore how the colonial past and the post- and neo-colonial present shape contemporary migrations. This research studies South-South migration in Chile, from a problematization focused on the ways that South Americans migrants experience their process in Santiago de Chile, to analyse the process of bordering they construct between their home country and the host communities. Throughout visual narrative analysis and crossing disciplinary boundaries we focus on how migrants imagine their past and future mobility, and the ways in which these processes draw a line of knowledge production embedded in the coloniality of power. One way of thinking decolonial es consider migrants no longer as an object overwhelmed by structural decisions that make them a subaltern subject and rather subject aware of the implications that may arise from the relationships established at destination, as well as the conditions in which the labour demands are inscribed in the place of arrival. Therefore, the definition of migrant is constructed by integrating the variety of experiences that make sense. In turn, the landscape is much more than a particular image, it is full of meanings where the emotional is articulated as an element that guides and orients the construction of such landscapes, according to their lived experiences.