“Call of the Fox”: The Fluidity of Mapuche Genres and Voices in Southern Argentina 

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In 1983, Mapuche singer Aimé Painé traveled to the small city of Esquel and performed a concert of traditional Mapuche works. Esquel, located in Argentina’s Chubut province, was one stop on an extended tour through southern Argentina. Painé, who like many Mapuche people of her era grew up isolated from her Indigenous roots, used song to reconnect with her heritage as an adult. By the early 1980s she had committed herself to performing Mapuche song for both Mapuche and non-Mapuche audiences, becoming the first person to do so widely. Through her work, Painé challenged the erasure of the Mapuche in Argentina and pushed for Indigenous visibility and recognition.

Thirty-seven years later, in 2020, 23-year-old Esquel musician Agustín Lino stumbled across a recording of Painé’s 1983 performance on YouTube. As a young person in the process of reconnecting with his Mapuche heritage, Lino was captivated by the audio captured in his hometown. He decided to create his own version of a piece that Painé had performed, the Ngürü tayil (Fox Tayil), a Mapuche lineage song (tayil) centered on the fox (ngürü). Lino’s composition, which reimagined Painé’s Esquel performance within the genre of an electro-folk song, reflected his own perspective as part of a new generation reconnecting with Mapuche heritage in the twenty-first century.

Lino’s interpretation of the Ngürü tayil opens up questions about how ancestral voices are translated across time, space, and genre. How might these archival voices serve young musicians wrangling with the fluidity of their own identities as they reconnect with Indigenous heritage and cultural practices? How do contemporary artists leverage the fluidity of archival musical material to creatively reclaim and reshape Mapuche genres and expressive culture in present-day Argentina?

An exploration of the Ngürü tayil and its continued circulation will help us explore these questions.

The Mapuche and Aimé Painé

Wallmapu, the ancestral territory of the Mapuche people, spans a large portion of southern South America that today falls within the nation-state borders of Chile and Argentina. Puelmapu, today Argentina, refers to the Mapuche territory east of the Andes mountains. During the late nineteenth century, Argentine military forces captured these lands from the Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples. Mapuche survivors of the conquest faced forced assimilation through concentration camps, mandatory schooling, and missionization. The state narratives that accompanied these processes erased Mapuche presence in Argentina, associating the Mapuche with Chile and denying their indigeneity to the east of the Andes. These narratives and histories of violence led to the emergence of a stigma surrounding Mapuche heritage and cultural practices that persists to this day.

Beginning in the 1970s, Mapuche people in Argentina organized to pursue recognition and rights for their communities. Aimé Painé was one important figure who emerged during this period. Born in 1943, Painé was forcibly separated from her family as a child, raised in a Catholic orphanage and later by a non-Indigenous family. She grew up learning that the Mapuche people were extinct and that her Indigenous heritage was shameful. As an adult, however, Painé returned to the south and reconnected with Mapuche relatives and traditions. She did so largely through music, where she applied childhood training in classical music to learning and performing Mapuche song. By the late 1970s, Painé was traveling throughout Argentina to perform Mapuche works and teach her diverse audiences about Mapuche culture and art. Painé tragically died in 1987, at the age of 44, but her legacy has continued to inspire Mapuche people throughout Argentina.

Rediscovering Aimé Painé

Augustín Lino first encountered Aimé Painé’s music on YouTube. Lino, despite having Mapuche heritage, grew up knowing little about this background. As a child and teenager in Esquel, Lino knew he had Mapuche family, but he did not speak the heritage language or feel that Mapuche cultural practices were particularly important to his life. Lino loved music, however, learning guitar and keyboard and playing in several local punk bands. 

In 2017, Lino hit a turning point in his music career. Upon moving to the northern Argentine city of Córdoba, he realized that the majority of the music he heard in Esquel wasn’t local at all, but rather came from more northern cities like Córdoba. Inspired to learn more about southern Indigenous music and its relationship to his own heritage, Lino sought out all of the information he could find. He was guided in his journey by the YouTube channel of Mapuche radio technician Lito Calfunao, who regularly posted archival recordings of Indigenous music. It was here that Lino discovered the recording of Painé’s Esquel performance, which he credits as foundational to his work:

“One day I was going through Calfunao’s archives because he has lots of music. I found [the Aimé Painé recording] and it was like my head started spinning. To hear a work that I had never encountered before, and furthermore a recital that took place in Esquel…This was something that really moved me.”

Lino was familiar with Aimé Painé’s name prior to hearing this recording, but knew little about her contributions. He sought out information about her, feeling especially connected to the performance in his hometown. Out of all of the pieces Painé performed, the Ngürü tayil stood out to Lino the most. 

Tayil are a traditional Mapuche discursive genre sometimes described as “sacred song.” Tayil vary widely in function, ranging from sacred, ceremonial texts to texts performed in casual spaces. Many tayil correspond to particular Mapuche lineages (kempeñ). Women perform the tayil of their families in ceremonies like the nguillatun, articulating a relationship through time between the performer, her ancestors, and ancestral lands. The lineage-based tayil called forth in ceremony are sacred and therefore not appropriate to circulate publicly or among non-Mapuche audiences.

Pieces like the Ngürü tayil, however, do not have the same sacred nature and have been circulated widely by Mapuche singers like Aimé Painé and Beatriz Pichi Malen. The Ngürü tayil focuses on the ngürü, or fox. The opening cry of mamayeu onomatopoetically recalls the foxes’ sound. The remaining lyrics recall the choike purrún, a Mapuche ceremonial dance associated with the lands of Puelmapu. The tayil ends with the sonic expression hué. This Mapudungun suffix frequently signifies a place, but according to my interlocutors, it functions here as an expressive feature that articulates the nature and habitat of the fox.

Painé’s performances in the 1970s and 1980s circulated pieces like the Ngürü tayil and expanded the genre outside of traditional spaces and into contact with new audiences. In doing so, she introduced fluidity into a traditional form by re-imagining the genre and its potential, thereby creating new expressions of Mapuche kinship and belonging. Through her performances, Painé established kinship with Mapuche people from many families and regions. She also brought Mapuche expressive culture to the awareness of the non-Indigenous Argentine public, calling on them to recognize their own Indigenous heritage, even if distant. For Painé, tayil contributed to a broader mission of disseminating Mapuche expressive culture as widely as possible. By blurring boundaries between Mapuche and non-Mapuche spaces and genres, Painé’s performances sonically shifted the Mapuche from the margins of Argentine society to its very center.

Agustín Lino and “El Grito del Zorro”

To create his own interpretation of the Ngürü tayil, which he titled “Grito del zorro” (Call of the fox), Lino aimed to take advantage of the musical material’s fluid nature while preserving the resonances and power of Painé’s original performance by directly sampling her vocals. He extracted these vocals from the original recording to serve as the track’s foundation. From there, he focused on the song’s rhythm, an indigenous rhythm known as the lonkomeo, matching Painé’s vocals to the rhythmic variation associated with the region that is today Esquel. The lonkomeo is typically played on the kultrun, a Mapuche drum, and Lino continued that tradition. However, he also added keyboard and synthesizer parts to give the song an electro-folk or downtempo feel. These new elements recontextualize Painé’s performance through what Lino refers to as a more “contemporary sound” that further pushes the boundaries of traditional Mapuche genres. 

Lino’s re-interpretation of Ngürü tayil and of Painé’s performance speaks to the current circumstances of many Mapuche people in Argentina in the 2020s. In Esquel and other smaller urban areas in Patagonia, young people must navigate a tension between increased recognition of Indigenous peoples and a continued stigma surrounding Indigenous identities. Since the 2010s, a growing number of youth in these cities are explicitly identifying as Mapuche and pursuing journeys of “autoreconocimiento” or self-recognition as Indigenous. A major way young people practice self-recognition is through musical expression. Music provides a useful tool to reconnect with ancestral practices denied to many youth through the state oppression and erasure that resulted in a gap in cultural knowledge and community connection.

This reconnection with Indigenous heritage and practices after a period of disconnect has birthed new and creative forms of expression like Lino’s work. For an artist like Lino, the fluidity of Mapuche music and its continued circulation and adaptation across time and space is essential for revitalizing Mapuche expressive culture and re-establishing the presence of Indigenous people in Patagonia. In the case of “Grito del zorro,” this fluidity emerges through the adaptation of a traditional genre to meet contemporary needs and aesthetics of urban Indigenous youth seeking to reclaim Mapuche heritage.

Despite the shifting genre, Lino’s track maintains an original function of tayil in articulating Mapuche kinship. By bringing Painé’s voice into the present in its original form through sampling, a technique that Lino has used in other songs incorporating archival recordings, he emphasizes the role of tayil to connect Mapuche people across time. In “Grito del zorro,” Lino puts himself into musical conversation with Painé. He thereby opens up a fluid dynamic that positions her as his ancestor, maintaining the generic function of the tayil while also changing its form.

In this fluid process, creativity and playfulness emerge as essential elements of Mapuche self-recognition. Rather than meticulously preserving the traditional form, artists like Lino highlight the emergent potential of these genres in current-day Puelmapu. Creating new musical works goes beyond simply listening to archival material or memorizing traditional forms. Instead, young musicians engage in an active process of re-learning ancestral traditions at the same time as they dynamically reshape them. 

Young artists can also run into issues when re-imagining traditional forms and circulating them beyond their original contexts. Painé herself received criticism for circulating Mapuche genres too broadly. Similarly, the work of young Mapuche artists has been critiqued for altering traditional forms and taking Mapuche practices outside of traditional domains. While Lino’s track and similar creations by other artists have received lots of positive feedback from Mapuche audiences, Lino notes that other audiences are resistant to the mixing traditional and contemporary genres and the widening circulation of Mapuche song:

“Mixing traditional music with contemporary music can seem distasteful to many people. I don’t think so. I believe that music is music and one can experiment with it… Argentina is above all considered to be a European country. But there are many more originarios than Europeans. To demonstrate that musically seems to me to be super important.”

Through the creation of pieces like “Grito del zorro,” Lino asserts the vitality of Mapuche expressive forms and demonstrates their importance for contemporary Mapuche people. As he creates work engaging with Mapuche traditional song, Lino expands his own knowledge and connections to Mapuche genres even as he himself shapes these genres as part of the new generation of Mapuche musicians. This fluidity is what makes the work of urban Mapuche youth such a powerful exercise and demonstration of Mapuche persistence and agency in Argentina today. 

For Lino, Aimé Painé and her legacy play a particularly important part of this process. “To discover part of my ancestors’ culture, she is a very important part,” he remarks. “She is a fundamental pillar in the attempt to recover ancestral voices that have been lost over time.”