El futuro en común.Las comunidades indígenas en las ciudades del bajo río Negro, Norpatagonia argentina

This article discusses the Indigenous communities that began emerging in the 1980s in the cities of Viedma and Carmen de Patagones, in Argentina’s North Patagonia. They have their own name and identify using the categories Mapuche and Mapuche-Tehuelche. These urban communities suffer double prejudice. On the one hand, their status as legitimately Indigenous is questioned under the argument that “true” natives inhabit the countryside and have traditional ways of living. Yet they are also seen with suspicion in the Indigenous world, because they have no territory of their own and do not share a common past. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, the article concludes that these urban Indigenous communities are better understood as shared projects for a common future. In other words, the active intention to form communities helps overcome uncertainty and the vicissitudes specific to concrete community configurations.