For the analysis of the cases studied we can examine the information from the interviews both from the point of view of the history of each person about their arrival in the city from the altiplano, and in terms of how the installation process developed. As we saw, this includes a constant movement between different homes of relatives and friends of the family until gaining the current housing that they occupy. Also, we review the city houses in themselves, using the original blueprints and those that were made by the course of this investigation recording the current reality. We found what we could from the study of the poor bibliography of material available, but evidence of the reality of Aymara traditional housing in the altiplano came primarily through the testimony and fieldwork on site visits. So, we believe certain realities arise that seem to respond to major changes in the ways of living of the Aymara families compared with the traditional situation.
The basic structure of traditional housing is presented as a common ground from which to analyse what is happening today in the Aymara houses in the city. The studied cases are transformed into examples of how an ethnic group facing a new
reality about their inhabitation can maintain or contradict the precepts that conformed to their past life in a different geographical and cultural space. The social housing, as a component around which life in the city is formally achieved by these Aymara families, plays an important role regarding the imposition, sought or unsought, of a different relationship between the person and their domestic space. This can be seen from the simplest cases where the housing solution unit only considers a single room and a bathroom, to those houses on two floors where the spaces forming the dwelling indicate a chosen programmatic destination and way of being used.
Likewise, the shape of the site appears to determine how the process of self-construction develops, We can see, however, that despite the current situation in the city being at first sight completely different from what happens in the uta, if we look more closely there are similarities that we can interpreted as maintaining certain principles or ideas about inhabitation that gives the Aymara families living in the city today a distinctive identity. We focused our attention on four situations which reduce basically to two possibilities: the assimilation of a different way of living, and the retention of memories about their traditional inheritance, which we believe cannot be simply dismissed as whimsical.
6.1 TRANSFERS AND MAINTENANCES
We have seen how the mobility process experienced by the Aymara people caused a series of changes in their ways of inhabiting. Since the move from the traditional spaces in the highlands to the new urban reality in the large coastal cities in northern Chile, the processes of hybridization between the Aymara culture and the apparently homogeneous Chilean society have become visible.
We have seen how certain aspects of traditional habitation have been reinterpreted in the urban dwellings. Thanks to the process of self-construction and the spatial precariousness of the social housing provided by the Chilean state, the Aymara
families that were studied were able to translate into the built unit those spaces that, as we have seen, allow us to see a re-interpretation of spaces and subsequent use (domestic or productive).
Moreover the overlapping of western cultural habits within which the Chilean society moves, resulted in the appearance in the cases studied of spaces not present in traditional housing, both regarding properly inhabites spaces and other services (like the bathroom) incorporated within the totality of the urban Aymara house documented.
However, given the permanent contact that the families keep with their traditional spaces, particularly with the uta, it is possible to observe the incorporation into it of certain elements that reinforce the ideas about hybridity mentioned in the opening chapter of this thesis.
We believe that since the process of chilenization, produced in the same traditional geographical area, the relationship between traditional Aymara society and Chilean society has been in a constant tension, which of course has always resulted that the Chilean state, eventually, ends up imposing its rules, whether in a scheduled way or simply because the boundaries are permeable.
We could also infer that the emergence of educational institutions, as one of the ways to "chileanize” the new territory, includes a degree of “propaganda” that promotes the idea of modernity and therefore created an ideology assuming a western way to inhabit. This occurs through evocative images of a national reality in constant modernization processes. The very presence of staff sent to the highland areas and high valleys, the traditional Aymara geographical space, to physically implement the Chilean presence in the area, may explain the early appearance of external models, artefacts, certain western customs and built spaces with external roots in the marka
villages beginning to lead a process of cultural hybridization, both material and symbolic.
This process in the traditional space is not surprising, because as we have seen that in the case of the Aymara, the ideas, values and practices delegated by past generations to give meaning to social life at a given time, have steadily been exposed to homogenizing attempts. This phenomenon of appearance in the traditional spaces of artefacts characteristic of western urban reality was most evident in the free tax zone, first in Arica and then more strongly in Iquique, where technological artefacts made in China and of a low value could be acquired.
However, the built spaces seem to have been less subject to change and hybridizations. The traditional Aymara housing, the uta, does not seem tp have been subject to changes in its programme, despite the contact with the Chilean state. Its location in the middle of the territory has meant that the process of acquiring the Chilean/western ways of living concentrated especially on utensils or artefacts on display in different rooms within it.
We can see for example that current kitchen utensils appear within traditional cooking space, and small gas cookers are used today indoors because of the ease of of use and the increasingly scarce availability of firewood needed for the traditional cooking fire.
Also it can be seen some artefacts such as disused drum washers are brought from the city to serve as ponds for water accumulation. This new practice not only presents strange objects within the traditional, inhabiting space, but also a change in certain aspects of daily life in uta, because it means that travel to eject water effluents