Recuperar modos de habitar el mundo: historias de vida de mujeres mapuche

The region now known as Patagonia was the site of genocide carried out by the Argentine and Chilean nation-states during their formative periods. In the final decades of the 19th century, the Argentine army pursued, murdered, kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured thousands of Indigenous people who had lived autonomously on their ancestral lands. Surviving Mapuche families and communities were forcibly displaced, taken to concentration camps, or deported to various cities to serve as cheap labor. This article emerges from my doctoral research, which centers on five life stories of Mapuche women—daughters and granddaughters of families who directly endured those atrocities. Throughout the piece, I explore the political power of remembering and forgetting in community with others, analyzing the memory processes these women have engaged in as part of their journey to understand and define their lives as Mapuche women. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic encounters, I examine the frameworks of meaning through which these women have reconstructed their life paths in connection with their families’ histories. From there, I trace how they have forged political identities as women actively involved in what they call “territorial recoveries.” Thinking alongside them about what has been lost and what is now being reclaimed becomes a central lens through which this article approaches the broader issues of land dispossession, memory work, and the life stories of a group of Mapuche women.