Humboldt noted that the great summits were not the central object of his interest: greater value was assigned to the territories extending between the mountain massifs. In the characterization of the mobility of the highlanders, something analogous happens: the ideals of sovereignty, freedom, independence and conquest embodied by them are exalted, as well as their capacity to elude the control of the state and capitalist modernity, and at the same time to propose their own rationality that confers them autonomy. It does not, however, delve into the dimensions that condition or make this mobility possible in terms of a local social and political topography. I argue here that such approaches, as observed in the central Andes of Chile, overlook more complex processes of domination, resistance and insubordination linked, in one sense, to gender, intergenerational and interspecies relations, and, in the other, to global transformations that include climatic, political and economic dimensions. The weavings occurring in the mountain valleys pose a mixture in which the smooth and the ribbed, the free and the subdued, the visible and the invisible cohabit and, in order to understand the way in which the links between the spaces of relative autonomy in the mountains and the spaces of relative subjection in the valleys are molded, it is necessary to look down to the precariousness of the mountainous areas and the spaces of relative subjugation in the valleys, it is necessary to look down to the foothills and discover in them those who, human and non-human, have been relegated to the backroom that makes possible, on the one hand, the mobility and, on the other, the resilience of its inhabitants.
