The Mapuche Diaspora: Colonialism, Postdictatorship Mapuche Politics, Anticolonialism

Abstract

Abstract:In this article, I discuss a corpus on the Mapuche diaspora, written by Mapuche intellectuals Pedro Mariman Quemanado, José Ancan Jara, and Margarita Calfio Montalva in the 1990s. I bring attention to this robust Mapuche intellectual production to focus on its situated analysis of colonialism, structural oppression, and anticolonialism. I examine how these authors theorized the long-standing Mapuche migration and urban settlement in the Chilean capital of Santiago as an effect of the recursive processes of Chilean colonialism, which have aimed to disarticulate the Mapuche people since the late nineteenth-century occupation of their ancestral territories. I also show how these authors' analysis of the Mapuche diaspora contributed to the creation of a "utopia of return," in which the recuperation of ancestral territories could only be accomplished through the resignification of Mapuche dispersal as a unifying anticolonial politics of national emancipation.