Pequeña vitivinicultura en el Valle del Itata: construcción de comunes, tragedia, despojo y reemergencias territoriales

The Itata River Valley, the cradle of vitiviniculture in Chile, which hegemony has been kept for many years by monoculture forestry plantations, and its peasant wines made from traditional strains have been undervalued by modern viticulture. In the last decade, however, it has been undergoing a difficult rebirth, hand in hand with traditional and new peasant associations and young new vintners. This document explores the set of biocultural and socioterritorial commons that have been created and safeguarded by peasant communities that allow this vitivinicultural sector re-existence. It is an extended common: a socio-natural network in which human and non-human actors participate -the grapes, the climate, the peasants, the sun, the earth, the bacteria, and finally a way of life and historicity- that altogether create a terroir that is lived and recreated as heritage. This common has been preserved and expanded by peasant ways of life, in the face of strongly homogenizing modern and industrial practices. It has recently been “rediscovered” and revalued, both by its own produces and by consumer markets. However, new actors appear –especially the large wine industry– which, acting as clandestine passengers or “free riders”, want to take advantage of this common without being part of the socio-natural network that has preserved, protected, and politically managed its revaluation. Thus, the tragedies and enclosures that affect this community were analyzed, as well as the processes of care and governance. The latter would allow sustaining of a new production cycle around wine, which represents an alternative and more sustainable form of social production in the territory. Thus, it was explored in the institutional mechanisms, local and regional protocols, capable of protecting this common against the appropriation that, like new “original accumulations”, makes industrial winemaking.