Mapuche Female Social Workers Confronting Racism and Patriarchy: Politics and Power in Everyday Practices

The voices of Indigenous women social workers continue to be underrepresented in the production of knowledge and academic social work debates, illustrating how the supremacy of whiteness and intellectual racism persists. This article discusses the scope of feminist perspectives on the exercise of micropolitical power -that which occurs in the everyday practices- of women social workers of Mapuche origin in Chile. From an autoethnographic perspective, and based on biographical interviews, we reconstructed the professional life histories of three Mapuche women social workers. In this article, we analyse how Mapuche women social workers confront the racist and patriarchal culture in their daily work. The findings suggest that their daily disputes have significant emancipatory potential but also entail significant professional fatigue, and at times, reproduce the precepts they are trying to combat. Articulating individual struggles into collective projects remains a challenge for these women, as Mapuche activist circles tend to have a male imprint, and social work activist circles remain monocultural. Drawing on the contributions of decolonial feminisms, we examine the barriers and opportunities that social work faces today in dismantling exclusionary logic within the profession and discipline itself.