Mapuche Women Organizations in the Chile of The Revolt

Abstract

This paper looks into those insurgent situated knowledge and «feelings-thoughts» based on the ancestral, peasant traditions of two lamngen (or women) specializing in accompanying women in the implementation of their social and political projects. The article holds that it is not possible to conceive the social outbreak that took place in October 2019 as a particular event in our social and political history as a civil and military post-dictatorship, or in our historical, political, social and cultural process of colonisation. Both lamngen weave together the revolts going on for decades in their territories and the Chilean great revolt which broke out in Santiago. Their situated voices show us the impact of the inequality, the discrimination and the violence that mark the lives of Mapuche women, as well as how the present pandemic crudely exposes them all. Both women show us how feminism alone cannot explain the impulse behind their mobilisation, their organisation and their demands for their rights as Mapuche women. The authors invite us to look at their historical resistance to neoliberal, extractivist, individualist, patriarchal, racist and colonialist capitalism as future political projects for the Chile that we shall draft in our new Constitution.