1. Dreams of an anchored state: mobility infrastructure and state presence in Quehui Island, Chile

Diego Valdivieso

Little by little we are meeting the expectations that the neighbours invest in our management [said the mayor during an interview outside the new municipal building on Quehui Island]. People are seeing that we comply, that we keep our word (...) the important thing is that today the neighbours, without the need to travel to the municipality, will have the possibility of coming to this small municipality that is here in Quehui to request aid from the different municipal departments from right here, from the island, without the need to go to the city [Castro]. We want to decentralise our management, and we are succeeding. (...) We want no neighbour to be left behind. The islands today are growing at a level of development that Castro has always had (...) we are proud because we feel that with this investment we are not only decentralising, but also improving municipal care in remote areas of our district. (Radio Chiloé, 16 November 2018)

On a sunny day in mid-November 2018 the mayor of Castro, the capital city of the Chiloé Archipelago in southern Chile, visited Quehui Island to inaugurate a municipal building. After years of waiting, unfulfilled promises, and several disappointments, the construction of one of the projects most coveted by the islanders was finally concluded. Following an approximate investment of 75 million pesos (approximately £73,000), the promise of a direct and prompt connection with the municipality and its various services and agencies was finally being materialised. A future without depending entirely on water-mobility infrastructure such as ferries and motorboats to access municipal services became more and more possible every day. The dream of what I address as an ‘anchored state’ (as opposed to a state that depends on water-mobility infrastructure) was coming true.

However, rather than addressing the degree of fulfilment of this promise, this chapter discusses the material and affective conditions that generate the dream or longing tied to this promised state infrastructure. To bring this objective to fruition, I build on 12 months of continuous ethnographic fieldwork I conducted during 2016–17 when the construction of the building was still a promise and the mayor had not yet visited the island to lay the foundation stone. Throughout that year, and within the scope of my doctoral research, I accompanied state officials who implemented the Programa de Desarrollo Territorial Indígena (PDTI) [Indigenous Territorial Development Programme], a state-led development programme focused on indigenous farmers, in the Chiloé Archipelago, seeking to explore the neoliberal state and how it can be studied through an analysis of the work of state actors at local level. By conducting participant observation, I gained access to the everyday activities of the ‘extension teams’ charged with the execution of the programme in Castro district. The team was composed of one coordinator, Jorge, and two technicians, Bruno and Renato. All of them had degrees in agriculture-related subjects.

Bruno and Renato are Chilotes1 and were born and raised in the proximities of Castro. Jorge, on the other hand, comes from a family of self-made estancieros [landowners in Patagonia] in the southernmost region of the country. His family was originally from Chiloé, and when he moved to the main island of the archipelago those family connections were still there. The three officials were raised primarily in the countryside, where they worked along with their families and actively participated in taking care of the crops and livestock that provided the means of support or additional income for their households. While Jorge and Bruno identified themselves as Chilotes, Renato identified himself as a Williche, the name of the original inhabitants of the archipelago,2 and proudly carried an indigenous surname that is regarded as an ethnic marker in the Chilean context. Their approach to farmers, and how they were perceived by them, was informed – and to a certain extent legitimised – by their shared territorial belonging, their upbringing moulded by a rural and peasant life, and the formal and informal education to which they were exposed.

Among their daily activities, the officials should offer regular technical advice and support to farmers participating in the programme. To achieve the improvement or continuity of their production systems and/or development of new endeavours and/or businesses in their territories, officials must carry out several visits to the users, distribute internal resources, capture and relocate external resources, transform these resources into projects (e.g. delivery of greenhouses, solar panels, motor pumps, and walking tractors), and arrange and coordinate labour training, workshops, and tours to view successful or different agricultural experiences.

These practices, in line with agricultural extension goals (transfer of technology, knowledge and advice), would take place in the rural sectors covered by the programme – beyond their office in the city. However, most of the farmers participating in Castro’s PDTI did not work and live in the rural areas surrounding the city, but mainly on one of the two islands under the administration of the municipality: Quehui Island, a ferry and motorboat dependent island, and one of the over 40 islands that compose the Chiloé Archipelago (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Chile, Lakes Region, and Chiloé Archipelago. Provided by Tamara Salinas-Cohn based on (A) www.curriculumnacional.cl; (B) www.gobernacionchiloe.gov.cl/geografia

The connectivity of Quehui Island, either with the main island of Chiloé (where the city of Castro is located) or with other nearby islands, strictly depends on water-mobility infrastructure, an assemblage of fixed and mobile infrastructure such as ferries, motorboats, timetables, piers, and routes. Both islanders and visitors must take state-subsidised ferries and/or publicly or privately owned motorboats. There are different routes to the island (see Figure 1.2) and the journey time varies depending on the option chosen. For example, the route between Castro and Quehui Island takes about two hours if one opts for the daily ferry service. Hence, motorboats, which allow for more flexibility and faster transport, are a preferred means of travel, a vital infrastructure in the everyday lives of the inhabitants of ferry dependent islands, and their presence is fundamental to the archipelago’s land and seascape. In the Chiloé Archipelago, it is almost impossible to imagine a panorama without one of these means of transportation, operational or abandoned, anchored in the bay or stranded on the beach.

Figure 1.2 The usual routes from Castro to Quehui Island. Provided by Tamara Salinas-Cohn based on Google Earth

Research bringing together mobility, island or archipelagic studies, and infrastructure is mainly focused on means of travel, socio-technical assemblages, and everyday strategies of the inhabitants of boat-dependent islands (Christensen and Mertz, 2010; Christensen and Gough, 2012; Vannini, 2011, 2012). Following the non-representational approach employed by Vannini, the work carried out by Lazo (2017), and Lazo and Carvajal (2018a, 2018b) in Chiloé on socio-technical assemblages and embodied experiences, is also a clear example of the preponderance of research focused on how everyday water mobility, the absence of fixed links with the mainland, and lack of permanent state infrastructure are a central aspect of the ways of life of those dwelling on islands.

Taking this realisation as a starting point, this chapter brings a new angle to this type of research. I aim to show how mobility is a key dimension of how islanders experience the state, in practical and affective terms, and how these experiences inform the longing for an anchored/present state on Quehui.

Drawing on my experiences moving back and forth between Castro and Quehui Island accompanying officials in charge of the PDTI in this area, I reflect on the ambivalent affective registers produced when water mobility acts as a central enabler, or inhibiter, of islanders’ interactions with the state. Furthermore, I illustrate how – regardless of other forms of state presence on the island – these recurrent, but sporadic, interactions with state actors in charge of delivering welfare policies give rise to narratives of a neglectful state, placing tension upon the different guises that the state takes on in local contexts.

State effects and state affects

Based on Mitchell (1999), Trouillot (2001), and Harvey’s (2005) work on state effects, this chapter addresses the role played by water-mobility infrastructure and the aspirations about anchored infrastructure on the affective and material dimension of the state being produced in the interactions between state officials and the islanders. To do this, I bring together ethnographic examples that challenge the idea of the state as a reified, freestanding actor. Following Mitchell (1999), due to the blurred boundary between society and the state, it would not be possible to consider the state as a bounded object or entity. Because of this, he suggests – and I agree – that the state can only be addressed as a complex set of practices and techniques involved in the continuous reproduction of its artificial differentiation from society.

Adding to this approach, but with a focus on how this process is produced and represented, Gupta (2012) allocates the responsibility for this distinction to the routinised practices of state agencies and representations created and mobilised by state officials. For him, the solidity of ‘the state’ cannot resist the detailed scrutiny of ethnography if we approach it as a highly complex arrangement of institutions with multiple functions, modes of operation, diversified levels, agencies and bureaus, and locations, pulling in different directions. In a similar fashion, and also influenced by the work of Mitchell and Troulliot, Aretxaga (2003, p. 398) argues that ‘the state as phenomenological reality is produced through discourses and practices of power, produced in local encounters at the everyday level’. This recognition of the ‘everyday’ as a space for state practice is also highlighted by Harvey (2005) when she affirms that the state, often regarded as an absent social agent or abstraction, appears in a concrete way in people’s lives, entangled in mundane sociality through the materiality of its effects.

Based on the aforementioned, and following Trouillot’s argument, the state’s lack of empirical boundaries and ‘institutional fixity’ (Gupta’s ‘complex array’) leaves room for an ethnographic strategy that would ‘focus on the multiple sites in which state processes and practices are recognized through their effects’ (Trouillot, 2001, pp. 126–7). Rather than residing mainly in its institutions, the materiality of the state depends on the iteration of these effects. Therefore, the question here is how the effects are created, and what it takes to create and maintain the distinction between state and society that has been made ‘real’ through the effort entailed in specific practices. Taking this into consideration, my focus here is on those performing the state or enacting its authority in a local setting, and on those who, through intermittent interactions with these state actors, encounter these state effects on a daily basis. In this way, the following sections will give an account of how the state is present in Quehui Island through practices and procedures that produce (material) state effects that resonate in the affective register and representations of the state, emerging from the interaction between front-line state officials and the islanders.

In Mazzarella’s (2009, p. 299) terms, ‘any social project that is not imposed through force alone has to be affective in order to be effective’. In a similar vein, Woodward (2014) argues that state effects are complementary to state affects. While the former tend to be described as seemingly unificatory practices involved in the production of state unity and coherence, the latter perform as the ‘differential’ accompaniment of these effects, emerging from contingent encounters and relations between state actors and ‘those who are enrolled in affective relations with the state’ (Woodward, 2016). What I want to extract from this line of argument is the complementarity between effects and affects. In this way, and following Laszczkowski and Reeves (2015), although state affects can be seen as the differential emotional responses fostered by the material consequences of state effects, they should not be addressed only as an epiphenomenon of political life. Here, I argue that this approach is an invitation to understand how the state is enacted and experienced, in affective and effective terms, when different technologies, actors, and aspirations come into play in a local setting.

In this way, the state is not only understood as the accumulation of practices and procedures that reproduce its ‘ghost-like’ bounded image at the local level, ‘but as thriving in embodied, affective resonances within and between persons and things’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015, p. 10). As such, considering the differential emotional responses that can take place in the everyday and intermittent encounters between islanders and state actors, the affective register invoked can adopt a variety of forms such as complaints (e.g. feelings of being neglected) and aspirations (e.g. the desire for a regular presence of the ‘caring state’).

Taking all this into account, this chapter aims to explore motorboats and mobility infrastructure as a technology of everyday reproductions of state presence, in its different guises, to examine the contradictory affective effects of state presence – or lack thereof – and the aspirations or dreams being informed by these state effects and affects. In this vein, and following the argument of von Schnitzler (2016), attention to infrastructure – and its politics – allow us to explore the forms that the political takes beyond its most common settings and practices. Infrastructure, she argues, is an enabler of techno-political relationships and connections with the state and plays a central role in the constitution of affective capacities.

The intermittent state

The PDTI extension team travels frequently (once or twice a week) to Quehui, using whatever option is available. These regular visits take place because most users of the programme (130 of 148) live and carry out their daily activities – agriculture, cattle, fishing, seaweed harvesting, and handicrafts – on the island. For one year, I witnessed how the team used diverse routes and transport options in order to reach Quehui’s pier. Large ferries transporting refuse vehicles for the islanders’ rubbish, small, subsidised ferries (foot passengers only) which connect the island with Castro daily, rented speedboats, old motorboats, big ones, and small ones were all employed according to multiple variables. For example, the team’s monthly budget, availability of motorboats which may be accompanying them, the number of state or local-government departments involved, available time, and weather conditions, among other factors, are potentially involved in how the island is reached.

The team’s presence on the island was mediated by two relevant aspects: weather conditions and accessible motorboats. Beyond these issues, and leaving aside schoolteachers and school administrative staff, healthcare professionals, and technicians,3 they are by far the state/local-government officials who spend the most time on this island. Because of this, for many islanders, they constitute the state’s most visible representatives. If they cannot travel (a situation which is quite common in the autumn and winter, and not unusual during the spring and summer) due to Castro’s harbour4 being closed because of strong winds and heavy rain, the presence of the state/local government is noticeably reduced or, according to a large number of islanders, absent.

When visiting the island, the PDTI officials often fulfilled tasks outside their contractual obligations. Owing to their advanced knowledge about this territory, and due to their regular visits, their role expanded beyond being mere technicians in charge of an agricultural extension programme. On the contrary, they would have to act as information brokers, guides for authorities visiting the island, a point of connection between other programmes and the islanders, escorts for external professionals running labour training courses, and as evaluators or executors of engineering projects, among others. Although they are on the bottom rung of the government and municipality organisational structure, as front-line state officials, the extension team is directly responsible for the dissemination of messages to the inhabitants of the island. They participate in the production of, and in the interactions and encounters through which, the power and meaning of the state are constantly being negotiated.

In territories such as Quehui, these encounters are determined by the absence of fixed state infrastructure and are mediated by the possibilities of the functioning of transport infrastructure: motorboats and ferries. Consequently, the role of PDTI officials as state actors, those who through their practices and interactions produce state effects, depends on matters that transcend their will and possibilities for action. Owing to this context, the state’s presence, on Quehui Island at least when it concerns its ‘caring face’ based on the delivery of welfare policies, is regarded as ambivalent and sometimes unpredictable; it is intermittent.

In physics, specifically in the field of dynamical systems, intermittence is understood as ‘a regime with long-lived nearly periodic laminar phases interrupted by turbulent bursts. This regime results from the collision of stable and unstable periodic cycles’ (Pikovsky, 1983, p. L109). I argue that the narratives around the state that the islanders convey, and the experiences of front-line officials embodying the state’s authority on the island, follow the patterns of this regime. Both the daily activities of the islanders and officials are characterised by a laminar rhythm – organised and smooth – interrupted by the sporadic interactions that mobility, and the infrastructure that enables or prevents it, renders effective.

Following Navaro-Yashin (2002, p. 135) the state obtains its power not only through its ideological enforcement carried out by institutions such as the army and the education system, but also through ‘quotidian, and seemingly spontaneous, events and occasions’. Thus, different state effects, and how people experience them, produce different state representations. Owing to the islanders’ interactions with actors representing diverse state agencies, the state is seen as having different roles, responsibilities, and features, and, thus, diverse representations and affective registers emerge. In Quehui, the guises assumed by the state are mainly informed by its sporadic and sometimes unpredictable presence.

Along the same lines as Navaro-Yashin, Obeid’s work shows how people would attribute different ‘faces’ to the state: the oppressive and neglectful face, and the ideal one, ‘the face that incorporates its citizens, listens to their problems and provides services that will develop the town’ (Obeid, 2010, p. 343). In their imagination, this face of the state, the one focused on giving rather than taking, exists elsewhere. Closer to Quehui, Goudsmit’s (2006) work with indigenous people in Bolivia, reflects on the analytical and practical consequences of similar scalar perceptions. The indigenous peasants direct their aspirations towards the benevolent and caring state imagined as the national government – again, elsewhere – and their frustrations towards the local government. Both Obeid and Goudsmit illustrate how people attribute different faces to the state depending on who they recognise as someone performing state-like practices. In both cases, to experience the caring face of the state you have to move away from its local expressions.

The images of the state that are being produced and are circulating in Quehui, to a greater or lesser extent, follow this same logic, but with the exception that both faces, or guises, appear intermittently, although, due to the persistent possibility of its inconvenience, the punishing state is experienced as more present than absent. Pinker and Harvey’s (2015) work on a railway project in the Sacred Valley in Peru shows how the affective force of the state sometimes emerges in the fluctuating movement between its ambivalent presence and absence. Likewise, but as a physical presence rather than a virtual force, the affective registers being elicited in Quehui are products of this same ambivalence. The image of both the caring guise of the state (embodied by officials in charge of delivering welfare programmes) and its inconvenient one (law enforcement) moving back and forth between Castro and the island, without the islanders being able to influence this flow, leaves the islanders with the feeling that the state, although always in an ambivalent way, is more absent than present. In experiencing this intermittence, and regardless of the state workers based on the island, the islanders convey and mobilise narratives about being neglected. Therefore, both ‘faces’ of the state, due to their intermittency, are combined together in what I identify as the locus of this kind of affective dissatisfaction – the ‘neglectful state’.

The guises of the state in Quehui Island

Ester, a short and corpulent woman, sat across from me on the other side of the woodstove, warming her strong hands and short fingers, removing some of the soil trapped under her nails after her morning’s work in her huerta (garden). She was wearing a thick woollen jumper and a muddy pair of white wellingtons. ‘A matecito?’5, she offered me with friendly eyes and a faint smile, before lifting the hot teapot on the stove and pouring some water into the mate. ‘Sorry for delaying our meeting, but for me, it is really complicated to leave my chores. I am sola [an expression indicating that someone – usually a woman – has no children or spouse], and I have to take care of my animals, my potatoes, my vegetables, and most importantly, I am taking care of my aunt’, she added, looking towards a closed door in the corner of the room. ‘She is very old and now she is bedbound because of a tumour on her leg. I have to be there, helping her and doing everything for her every day. Supposedly a nurse or someone from the municipality is coming to see her soon, but you know how things are. If they come to the island they come for a short time, and they want to leave soon.’ In a resigned tone, she finished, saying, ‘We will have to keep waiting.’

I had arrived at Quehui’s main pier the previous evening using the state-subsidised ferry service. My plan was to meet the PDTI officials after conducting a couple of interviews (one of them with Ester), but they had not been able to travel that morning because one of the municipality’s motorboats had not left Rilán (a small village located on the peninsula opposite Castro with a ‘usable’ – but somewhat deteriorated – jetty). The maritime authority had indicated that the harbour was open, but the forecast suggested that during the afternoon the weather would get worse. This risk motivated some municipal officials to convince the motorboat’s manager to cancel the trip to the island. Regardless of whether some islanders had already approached the Rural Emergency Centre or the pier in Los Ángeles, waiting for an official who would bring them information, documents, or would deliver public goods, like so many other times, the officials never came. Although the harbour was open and navigation to the island was possible, and despite the waiting islanders who planned their day according to the activities programmed by the officials coming from Castro, the motorboat never reached the island’s main pier.

These kinds of recurrent events enabled the emergence of narratives that questioned the presence of the state on the island. Owing to the role played by sea-related activities in their daily lives (fishing, shellfish and seaweed harvesting, transport, among others), many of the islanders are aware of the conditions of navigation. Therefore, they have the knowledge to decide if officials representing different public services (from the municipality or central government) are unable to travel to the island due to structural causes (i.e. weather conditions) or what they perceive as a lack of commitment. Therefore, this context is not only informed by officials not going to the island but also the affective responses that their intermittent presence produces.

The temporal dimension that this intermittence brings with it resonates with Auyero’s (2011) work on the micro-relations between state officials and the urban poor in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His ethnographic account illustrates how the urban poor is politically subordinated by the state via the normalisation of the waiting process. Like the urban poor in one of the largest cities in Latin America, the inhabitants of Quehui Island are used to waiting for the ‘attention’ of the state. However, unlike Auyero’s informants, the islanders’ wait on the island, is mediated by other factors such as climate and access to water-mobility infrastructure. Similarly, the waiting does not occur in the presence of state agents, but in their absence.

I visited the island frequently during my year of fieldwork to identify the institutions, front-line workers, and individuals with local authority performing state-like practices: dealing with local affairs, implementing public policies, and delivering public goods. In this sense, the perception of the inhabitants of the island that they are in a continuous state of neglect on the part of the local and central government seems to be paradoxical. However, as an ethnographic dichotomy, the presence/absence of the state can be understood as an affective response that describes the relationship of the islanders with wider structures of power in emotional terms, due to their feeling of being historically and currently excluded from national dynamics (Rasmussen, 2015) such as economic progress, development, and connectivity.

On the island, there is state infrastructure (i.e. state schools and a small clinic), and a workforce, mostly residing on the island during their working days, hired by institutions under the administration of the local government of Castro, with resources coming from state institutions such as the Ministries of Health, Agriculture, Defence, Education, the Home Office, and Social Development. Although all these services provide resources and create spaces for their officials to visit the island, public infrastructure located on this territory is still scarce, and mainly focused on providing health and education services. Nevertheless, even though there are schools, an emergency health centre, and front-line workers on the island, islanders frequently affirmed that the Chilean state had historically abandoned them and that this situation has not changed much. They experience the intermittency of the state when waiting for public officials who do not come, or when they see them hurrying to take the motorboat back to Castro to avoid getting ‘stuck’ on the island. Therefore, in a territory such as Quehui, narratives surrounding the idea of state neglect, or its frequent absence, are relatively common.

The inhabitants of Quehui are aware of, and participate in, state-like activities, and interact with front-line officials in charge of delivering public services. Although the mayor and the municipal council’s visit to the island – assuming state-like capacities to deal with local affairs such as healthcare and connectivity – was not a common occurrence, the presence of doctors, among other public servants, and the existence of public infrastructure and services in the territory, exposes the gap between the affective and subjective dimension of the state (imaginaries) and its material effects.

Public infrastructure on the island primarily supports education and healthcare initiatives. Both services are administered and operated by the Corporación Municipal de Castro [Municipal Corporation of Castro] which operates under the local government using resources from the Ministries of Education and Health (Marcel, 1996).

On the one hand, the existence of state schools in Quehui provides a regular state presence (at least during the school year), materialised in its buildings and its staff – teachers and administrative personnel who mostly come from Castro and its surroundings, and who, in most cases, only reside on the island on working days. In addition, at the time of my fieldwork, a doctor was living on the island and he was responsible for the Posta de Salud Rural de Quehui [Rural Emergency Clinic of Quehui], two paramedics worked rotating shifts, and a ‘rural team’ consisting of a doctor, nurse, nutritionist, paramedical technician, psychologist, midwife, social worker, administrative staff, and a dentist carried out what they call rondas médicas (medical rounds) once a week. The medical round supposedly takes place every Tuesday, but due to the port being closed or because the head of the medical team (sometimes influenced by another team member) considers that the weather could deteriorate during the day, their presence on the island is not as regular as the islanders would wish.

Since July 2017, the Dirección de Desarrollo Comunitario (DIDECO, Community Development Management) from the municipality has been renting a motorboat to enable front-line officials in charge of different governmental programmes to travel to Quehui and Chelín (a small island a short distance from Quehui also administered by the Municipality of Castro). Every Thursday (weather permitting) a group of no more than ten officials gather on a jetty close to Castro, waiting for the rented motorboat to cross to the islands to carry out their field tasks.

Other forms of state presence could be found in the, often unexpected, visits by officers from the Armada [the navy], Polícia de Investigaciones [detectives], and Carabineros [the police]. The presence of officials from these institutions in Quehui is an uncomfortable one. On the one hand, several islanders with whom I talked about police officers or navy officers visiting the island told me that they thought that their tasks focused on prevention and control were essential to the islanders’ feelings of safety and peace. On the other hand, I realised that most of their daily commercial activities take place under the radar of these law enforcers. Thus, an ambivalent feeling emerges when those state actors disembark in some areas of the island, or when they are seen on the sea routes used by the islanders.

It is quite common to encounter a navy speedboat circulating between the smaller islands, the ramps, and Castro, undertaking routine inspection tasks. While sailing in the area they may stop motorboats to check if their documents and registration are up to date, or they may be patrolling in order to stop, any illegal flete (a paid informal service that allows movement through the archipelago without depending on the daily subsidised ferries) or transactions happening at sea (principally black-market oil and unofficial seafood or cattle trading).

Unofficial trading is exemplified by what happened on a cold and rainy morning when the daily ferry to Castro did not arrive, and its horn did not announce its imminent departure. After a couple of minutes talking to some frustrated islanders who would have to wait a day to be able to travel to the city and undertake their errands, I returned to Camilo’s inn, where I was staying. I needed to get to Castro somehow. I asked Camilo and Jacinta, his wife, if they knew any motorboat owner who would take me to Puchilco, a settlement on Lemuy Island a journey of approximately 30 minutes from Los Ángeles – the main village on Quehui. I knew that if I could get to Puchilco, I could go by taxi to Puqueldón (the main town on Lemuy), I could then take a direct bus to Castro. ‘I think Pedro is the best option’, said Camilo, looking for the number on his old cell phone. ‘He is one of the only ones that does fletes even in this weather.’ A couple of hours after I called him, Pedro’s brown and white motorboat entered the bay and moored at an old jetty. Just as I was about to board the motorboat he shouted, calling for my attention, and indicating a navy speedboat entering the bay. ‘We can’t leave until they are gone’, he told me as he approached me at the base of the jetty. ‘Don’t worry; it shouldn’t take too long.’ When I asked him why we could not start our journey, he explained to me that, as with most of the motorboats in the area, neither the papers nor the registration of the boat were up to date. After a couple of detectives had taken some statements in the village in relation to a boating accident at night, the navy speedboat finally left the main pier. Even though they were no longer visible, Pedro was still worried. ‘They could be waiting near the island’, he said, while calling a friend who would be able to see from his window if the speedboat was moving away from the island’s coast. He hung up smiling, ‘Let’s go! They are already gone.’

Pedro and the other motorboat owners operating in this area are usually islanders who see owning a boat as an opportunity to complement their traditional sources of income (agriculture or fishing) or choose this occupation as their main source of livelihood. In order to get this extra income and because there is a demand for a transport service that operates rapidly and outside the schedule established by the state-sponsored ferry system, motorboat owners could provide flete services on a daily basis despite the risk of being caught by those who embody state law enforcement. In doing so, they enable the movement of people, cattle, seaweed, seafood, building materials, gas canisters, and fuel between the nearby islands. Because they work without the required permits and they are often involved in trading products of dubious origin or moving products defined by the authority as dangerous (i.e. fuel and gas), they operate outside the law and are always on the lookout, hoping that a naval speedboat would not appear on the horizon.

In a similar vein, islanders who own cars or motorcycles would prefer that the Carabineros did not visit the island unless necessary. The presence of the Carabineros in these smaller islands is usually sporadic and in response to some unexpected incident. They travel to the islands when someone makes a complaint or to investigate a criminal incident that has occurred during their absence. In these processes, they take statements and identify those responsible for the illicit actions denounced by witnesses or victims. However, they sometimes travel to these territories for the purposes of prevention and control. These visits often include handing out tickets and fines for expired driving licences, unregistered cars, bad driving practices, and traffic offences. In my travels around the island, I witnessed how people who saw their green and white motorboat would call someone on the island to warn them: ‘Van los verdes’ (the greens – because of the colour of their uniforms – are going).

Considering that the state and the local government were present through schoolteachers and administrative staff, doctors and paramedics, frequent visits of the medical team, police officers, naval officers, and other front-line officials implementing localised programmes, we need a wider and more open understanding of the state to do something about this feeling of neglect. This comprehensive idea of the state rests, as I have already stated, on a particular attention to the everyday interactions and the differential emotional responses emerging from the relationship between the islanders and front-line state actors at the local level. However, in this case, the paradoxical tension between state neglect and state presence is specifically maintained by the fundamental role played by mobility infrastructure, such as motorboats and ferries, in a context characterised by the absence of fixed links, difficult access (and departure), and limited permanent state infrastructure.

As Merriman and Jones (2017) and Obeid (2010, 2015) contend, affect is not unidirectional, and bodies might react (be affected) differently to encounters with the state. Based on this differential effect, the presence (or intermittence) of the state in Quehui takes on different guises depending on the type of state actor visiting the island, the frequency of these visits, the nature of the services delivered, and how this delivery is carried out. All of this is mediated and determined by access to, and the feasibility of using, mobility infrastructure. As I will discuss further in the next sections, regardless of the intermittent presence of the state, islanders convey narratives and experience practices that actualise the idea of a neglectful state. Because they feel abandoned, they express a longing for the stable presence of the good and caring state (i.e. welfare programmes) and emphasise the inconveniences produced by the presence of the punitive state. These narratives make visible the ambivalence and uncertainty that interactions with ‘the state’, not as a coherent entity but as a flexible and dispersed configuration, may produce (Pinker and Harvey, 2015). In this vein, the state can be the locus of conflicting emotions and feelings that express desires for connection and disconnection on their own terms (Jansen, 2014; Laszczkowski and Reeves, 2015).

As technical means to connect and/or disconnect places, mobility infrastructure seems to be particularly effective in the articulation of materiality, affect, and feelings. Because these technologies allow or resist the movement of bodies, they also enable the circulation and emergence of affective relations informed and produced by different ‘emotions, feelings and memories’ (Merriman and Jones, 2017). I suggest that when these mobility infrastructures are involved in the movement of state actors, controlled by state regulations, or when they reveal relations of state presence/absence in a particular territory, the state emerges as an (imagined) body capable of affect towards other bodies. Because other bodies have the capability of being affected to different degrees (or not being affected at all), the imagined state might produce contradictory and concomitant affects that could be expressed as desire or contempt for it (Obeid, 2015).

Mobility infrastructure and the affective register

The dynamic image of the state produced in this territory allows islanders to perceive front-line state officials as state actors with state-like capacities. Hence, if they are not on the island, and therefore the islanders do not interact with them, the emergent idea of the state produced in their everyday practices validates the narratives regarding the neglectful state. However, this ‘affective register’ is also informed by the entanglement of three elements that play a vital role in the daily life of the islanders: the complex nature of archipelagic formations, the southern weather, and access to and availability of mobility infrastructure.

Added to the complexity of finding a motorboat, crossing to Quehui is difficult when the southern weather shows its temperament. As the chief of the PDTI team once described, activities reliant on sea transport in the south of Chile not only imply the dangers of moving through troubled waters, but also the possibility of not being able to get to or leave the island. According to a report provided by the Port Captaincy of Castro, the local navy office in charge of updating, notifying, and imposing the closure or opening of local harbours based on information provided by the Meteorological Service of the Chilean Navy, during two periods in 2016 and 2017, out of a total of 445 days, 145 (approximately 33 per cent) were categorised as ‘variable’ (port closed for small boats6 outside the bay, and sometimes inside too), ‘bad weather’ (harbour closed for small boats outside and inside the bay), or ‘storm’ (totally closed). These categories, along with the dangers of sailing in these weather conditions and other issues such as breakdowns, define and determine the possibilities for action by motorboat owners and patrones (a position similar to that of captain, but for fishing, passenger or merchant boats under 3,000 GT – Gross Tonnage), and therefore the intermittence of the state’s perceived presence on the island.

Weather, and the naval regulations that it activates, frequently immobilises motorboats, drawing our attention to how these technologies of mobility affect the movement of bodies (Christensen and Gough, 2012) and the consequences of these (im)mobilities on local supply and state presence/absence. In the same way, infrastructural breakdown highlights the centrality of maintenance and repair, which continuously allows or prevents connection, movement, and flow (Graham and Thrift, 2007). Whatever the case, the presence of unestablished links in this area of the archipelago highlights the importance of water-mobility infrastructure (Vannini, 2011), which normally resides in a naturalised background as something banal and unexceptional (Edwards, 2003). Hence, one of the ways in which the desire to overcome the inconveniences and obstacles posed by relying on water-mobility infrastructure (taming the uncertainties of availability, maintenance, and weather), is by channelling it through claims for fixed, or what I call ‘anchored’, infrastructure placed in these challenging territories.

Every Friday, a group of schoolteachers would do whatever they could to leave Quehui and join their families and friends in Castro. They jointly organised the rental of a motorboat which, depending on weather conditions, would take them by different routes to their destination. They would assemble in the shelter (a wooden structure with a room and a large, covered terrace, overlooking the pier and the estuary) on the main pier. Now protected from the cold, rain, and wind, they would chat while they waited for the motorboat, and some of them bought food and drinks from the yellow local store opposite this building. Together they boarded the motorboat and then set course for Castro (or another destination that would allow them to reach the city after finding land-based public or private passenger transport services).

A local motorboat owner provided this flete service. His old white and brown motorboat, always travelling at the minimum possible speed to reduce fuel expenses, allowed him and his passengers to reach a pier or jetty with accessible roads to Castro. He was also well known for being one of the few motorboat owners who would set sail even under weather conditions that would stop others travelling, or at least make them think twice about the possible outcome of such a reckless practice. ‘Always in a hurry to leave’, Iris once told me. She was an old woman who owned and managed the local store opposite the pier. On that occasion, I was buying some sweets while the motorboat with the teachers aboard was leaving the bay. ‘As if they were going to catch something’, she added with her distinct cynicism and bitterness, looking towards the motorboat almost disappearing into the landscape. With that last statement, Iris implied that they were running away from the possibility of catching a disease: they were escaping, leaving the islanders, with their sickness, behind.

But they were not the only municipal or state workers departing that day. Like them, and like every Friday, the doctor living on the island would use the ambulancha (a pun resembling the word ambulancia – ambulance – which comes from ambu – ambulance, and lancha – motorboat) to leave and spend the weekend in the city. On that particular day, the PDTI officials and I were also waiting for our lift to the main island. After the conversation with Iris, and with some sweets in my pocket to share with the team, we waited for the flete service provided by another available motorboat owner to leave Quehui and reach our homes and families. On an ordinary weekend, only the paramedics would remain on the island, working alongside the islanders and providing care services. From the perspective of the inhabitants of the island, those left behind, the intermittence of the state becomes a reality through their affective registers. You could almost feel the sentiment of abandonment rising and floating in the air, while some islanders gathered near the pier, smoking cigarettes, sharing beers and a crate of wine, and watching the motorboats departing.

Taking into account the differential affects produced by these events, different feelings and emotions arise. One of those, frequently elicited by the islanders when talking about ‘the state’, was expressed as a feeling of abandonment. Seeing the officials doing everything in their power to leave the island has a strong affective resonance in some islanders who subsequently circulate narratives fuelled by these experiences and notions of ‘relatively immutable historic relations’ (Merriman and Jones, 2017). ‘It has always been like this’, Marta said to me. She had worked as a schoolteacher on the island for almost 40 years. Now retired and settled in a large old house, she offered accommodation to tourists, workers carrying out seasonal tasks (i.e. repairing the roads), and state officials needing to spend a couple of nights on the island. ‘They used to come less often because everything was harder back then [referring to connectivity], but now they leave as soon as they can’, she added.

Marta’s stories about working as a rural schoolteacher in the past, where everything involved a greater effort due to the lack of both infrastructure and state aid, historically informs the affective register that she expresses in the present. However, what was striking in her narrative is that she herself was hired by the state as a schoolteacher, and had to carry out state-like practices. As Wilson (2000) argues, establishing schools in peripheral territories was, and could still be considered as, a technique of government that instantiates the state. Nonetheless – and also informed by her condition of being originally from a town on the main island and, therefore, having lived in a territory with better connectivity – her narrative expressed her capacity to be affected by intermittent relations with state institutions and front-line workers. Regardless of having been a state actor, her time on the island and having lived under other conditions, living on an island dependent on sea transport with difficult access, enhances the image of the neglectful state.

Feelings such as a longing for the caring state (welfare and care programmes), the inconvenience of the forceful state (the police and the navy), and the feelings emerging due to the intermittent presence of front-line state workers arriving and departing, may arise at the same time. These affective registers are intertwined in paradoxical and concomitant ways, and are always historically (by memories and narratives) and situationally informed. However, this entanglement should not be addressed as an irrelevant or meaningless occurrence, but as an example of the intricacies of the affective contingencies circulating around the images of the state.

Anchoring the state

The intermittent presence of the state is experienced as a dynamic mobility of individuals (front-line workers) and infrastructure (motorboats and ferries) going back and forth. Islanders are used to seasonality and predictable changes. The everyday life of those involved in agricultural or sea-related activities depends on knowing how to interpret the wind and the tide. At the end of winter and the beginning of spring, they plant potato seeds. The first freeze of the autumn activates the garlic seed. The northern wind brings rain and the southern wind sun, and low tide allows them to collect shellfish and seaweed. Everything seems to be foreseeable and their experiences provide them with the means to anticipate possible events and to plan their daily, monthly, or seasonal activities based on this knowledge.

One sunny summer afternoon, the farmers stopped baling hay after looking up at the sky. The wind had changed course, anticipating the arrival of a storm. The humidity would rot the unprotected bales scattered on the field, making it clear – at least for those who knew how to read the signs – that they would need to find different work because rain would fall the next day. For an outsider, like me, watching them abandon their activities seemed, at first, a whimsical practice. Because they saw what I could not – that the rain was coming – what they were doing became futile and the next day’s activities were already structured by conditions to come. However, this form of planning frequently became impractical when used to anticipate if a programme meeting would, or would not, take place the next day. The islanders would gather outside the local neighbourhood association building waiting for the arrival of the front-line state official who had summoned them until they received a call cancelling the activity, giving excuses, and asking for their understanding. Resignedly, they would say goodbye to each other before going back to their suspended activities. Oxymoronically, islanders experience some interactions with ‘the state’ as a constant intermittence.

Yet the relationship between the islanders and state actors and institutions not only takes place on the island. There are myriad motives for people from Quehui to travel to the main island, specifically to Castro such as to stocking up with provisions, visiting friends and family, sporadic work commitments, leisure and entertainment, medical appointments, among others. However, one of the main reasons for leaving the island could be regarded as a consequence of procedures required by some state or local-government agencies to gain access, or remain in, different welfare programmes such as the PDTI. Every now and then, the users or beneficiaries of a state programme would have to travel to Castro and face some sort of bureaucracy, and often the outcome of these journeys was futile. This created a situation in which they must once again devote an entire day to take care of their unresolved issues, without any guarantee that they would achieve their goal this time.

In the context of an interview, Renato, a PDTI official, analysed how these journeys to the city could be a source of frustration for the islanders:

(…) people schedule their trips, and because almost everyone has to take care of animals, they would frequently come [to Castro] just for the day. When they come to deal with some paperwork, sometimes they fail because of lack of time. They get frustrated and, because of that, they postpone it (…). They feel frustrated by the ferry times, which are very limited. They would arrive at 9.30 am, they would get to the municipal office at 10 am, and there would already be a large queue. At 1 pm they would be hungry, because by 12 or 1 they have still not been attended to, and they might realise that they require 50 more documents, so, eventually, they would just leave.

In order to face the distinctive and non-commensurable rhythms of the weather, state presence, and municipal office procedures, the Castro local authority started the construction of a municipal building on the island in mid-2017. Although for some islanders and state officials the fulfilment of this promise will not bring anything new to the relationship between the local government and the local population, a significant number of the islanders have high expectations of the possible consequences for their everyday interactions with bureaucracy. For this last group, anchoring the state on the island would provide a direct connection to front-line officials working in a local office, therefore making trips to the main island somewhat avoidable and, thus, less frequent.

Marcelo, one of the islanders who most openly demonstrated his enthusiasm about the construction of a local office expressed the following:

(…) today people go to Castro to do paperwork ... I will give you an example, for [the Ministry of] National Assets, and they spend all their day in the office because there is an immense flow of people, and people go there all day, and they do not even have lunch. Having that office here [in Quehui], we would not have to go to Castro. We could have an Environmental Health Office too, a Tourism Office, a Social Department office so that people could go with their concerns, to see how they can help you. On our island, there are also many needs that have to be satisfied. Some people do not have work, and there are elderly people who are entirely dependent on the state [approx. £120 per month], so having an office on the island would be a tremendous benefit to people in those circumstances.

Sharing photographs of the building under construction, the mayor of Castro publicly commented on his Facebook page: ‘With “works” [his quotation marks] we respond to the dreams of our neighbours (…).’ Several months later, he, accompanied by a couple of councillors, visited the island and inaugurated the building. On that occasion, he commented: ‘the important thing is that today, the residents of the islands can perform all kinds of procedures in this small municipality without having to travel to Castro. We want to decentralise our management, and we are achieving it’ (Chaparro, 2018).

Based on Renato, Marcelo, and the mayor’s accounts, the construction of the local municipal office ties together the promises made by the local government and aspirations coming from the islanders. Throughout the mayor’s election period that took place in 2016, the final part of which coincided with my fieldwork, the current mayor of Castro, who was born and has family in Chelín Island, sought to directly address the feelings of abandonment that islanders frequently suffer from and with which he, as an islander, was familiar. During the mayor’s visits to the island in which he addressed the construction of the municipal delegation, he generally used the tense of infrastructure – the future perfect (Hetherington, 2017). ‘We will have solved that problem when the building is ready’, I heard the mayor tell a neighbour who complained about having to travel to Castro every time a state-sponsored social programme asked him for a document issued by a public service. By referring to an action that will be completed between now and some point in the future he was giving shape to an anticipatory state: through the materiality of this infrastructural intervention, he was able to link the islanders’ past and present notions of the neglectful state with their aspirations of connection and state presence.

Thereby, the local office on Quehui Island, regardless of its actual effects after its official opening, is the result of a specifiable lack resonating through the affective narratives mobilised by the islanders. Harvey (2017) affirms that, as specific interventions that operate through the articulation of identifiable gaps and calculable outcomes, development projects carry a moral charge of an improved future. In this vein, projects such as roads or bridges carry the promise of enhanced connectivity, directly addressing ‘a sense of physical isolation or disconnection’. Likewise, and because it falls within the category of development projects, the new municipal building generates similar expectations by gathering aspirations and promises around facilitating access to public services and, therefore, improving the quality of life of the island’s inhabitants.

Throughout the chapter, I have argued that mobility, and the infrastructures that enable and disable it, play an essential role in how Quehui islanders experience the state, in practical and affective terms. This final section expands the argument, showing how an ‘anchored’ state infrastructure can be involved in the reconfiguration of a relationship rendered as intermittent or inconvenient. By tackling the state as ‘set of practices and processes and their effects’ (Trouillot, 2001), and considering that we cannot separate its abstract manifestation from its material presence, both the front-line officials visiting and the building (and the staff who will work in it) acting as a decentralised municipality, produce state effects. In this case, the decentralised municipality acts in opposition to the affective and practical consequences of depending on motorboats, by rendering the state stable, reducing its intermittence, and anchoring its ‘ideal face’ or caring guise. On the other hand, its uncomfortable and enforcing face continues to be present due to, paradoxically, the constant threat posed by its intermittence.

Conclusion

In a territory defined by its physical separation, mobility is, of course, essential. Following Baldacchino’s (2016, p. 6) definition, archipelagos are ‘fluid cultural processes, sites of abstract and material relations of movement and rest, dependent on changing conditions of articulation or connection’. State effects are not impervious to these flows and changes. On the contrary, these effects, and their ability to affect, are the consequence of these processes.

Throughout this chapter, I presented evidence to argue that state officials’ visits and activities, especially in areas that are difficult to access, inform affective registers about the presence/absence of the Chilean state. This ‘intermittency’ is subject to external phenomena such as access to, and the feasibility of using, mobility infrastructure. I illustrated how this infrastructure plays an essential role in how Quehui islanders experience the state, in practical and affective terms, and in the emergence of aspirations related to reducing this intermittence by anchoring its caring face through fixed infrastructure. As Rumé (2022) demonstrates in this volume, infrastructural constructions, in this case a municipality building on the island, affect ‘infrastructured practices’ of dwelling and mobility. All this together produces and puts into circulation divergent narratives in terms of the manifestations of the state that the islanders long for (its caring guise enacted in the delivery of public services), or are unwilling to accept (its neglectful face, that is the product of its intermittence, and its inconvenient actualisations embodied by law-enforcement officials).

The promise to anchor the state by reducing the role played by water mobility in allowing or hindering the interactions between islanders and state actors draws attention to the shifting affective and material effects being produced by the state and intermittent mobility infrastructures in isolated territories. In this way, my focus on infrastructure, its affective dimensions and material effects, has allowed me to expose the dynamic processes involved in the enactments and unmarked boundaries of the state in local settings. Infrastructure provides a physical medium for state actors to travel and for state practices to be enacted, but it does not set up a clear and fixed line to define it as a discrete and coherent entity. On the contrary, its dynamic and permeable nature comes to light when confronted with its everyday actualisations and the effects that these generate in the process.

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