Atravesar el viento blanco: recuperar territorio en clave femenina. (Historias de desujeción de mujeres mapuche)

Abstract

The territory currently known as Patagonia was the scene of a genocide carried out forward by the Argentine and Chilean nation states in their formative stages. On the last decades of the 19th century, the Argentine Army persecuted, murdered, kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured thousands of indigenous people who lived sovereignly in their territories. Families and communities survivors, belonging to the Mapuche People, were displaced from their places, taken to concentration camps or deported as cheap labor to various cities. Throughout the following years, protection against violence and discrimination brought with it silence, the erasure of language and the hiding of collective knowledge. Without However, the (great)grandparents 2 genocide survivors found creative ways to leave traces or transmit knowledge to subsequent generations. This thesis works, on the one hand, around the life stories of five women who are granddaughters. and great-granddaughters of ancestors who have suffered those abuses firsthand. Interpret those stories to understand the meanings with which these women reconstructed their trajectories, in coordination with those of their families, to create the political positions from which Today they present themselves as women fighting for their territories. At this level of analysis, the issue of the thesis is the sociohistorical, political and emotional process of identity reconstruction and organization of a violated People, from the point of view of women who today carry territorial recoveries advance in the Andean region, in the vicinity of the city of Bariloche. On the other hand, the thesis delves into the processes involved in the work of reconstruction of collective memories, in contexts of inequality to establish meanings about the past and its articulation with the present. At this other level of analysis, the thesis hopes to be a 2 I have guided the writing of this text based on criteria of non-sexist and inclusive language, as has been approved by the Board of Directors of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (2019). contribution to addressing memories that have been altered and subordinated post-genocide, to understand how and in what aspects, the work of reconstruction of a shared past They can be as difficult as they are restorative. In the conjunction of both levels of analysis, the thesis addresses the memory processes undertaken by five women who, when giving meaning to their own lives as Mapuche women, reveal the political potential of remembering and forgetting together with others. As a starting point, I consider that, just as structural conditions of dispossession persist territory, violence, impoverishment and discrimination, the experience also endures shared, among my interlocutors, of still returning. The idea of ​​return presupposes the history of the long pilgrimages of families to return to the territory from which they came displaced, but also, and in a broader sense, recreates the meaning and function of memory. The return organizes life stories about the social trajectories of women with which I worked, as a metadiscourse – often implicit – computer of the experience. So, and if it is remembered in the key of return (“return”), it is because the experience It is crossed by distances, breaks and losses. With these few words, I introduce the questions that guided this thesis: What kind of efforts did these women undertake to “get back on their feet” as “women?” Mapuche in defense of their territories”? How were the feelings of pain, nostalgia, loss, shame and fear as they traveled from the neighborhoods peripheral and marginal areas of the city of San Carlos de Bariloche towards the territories recovered or defended where today they raise their rukas (houses)? What stigmas are did they face? In what ways do the experiences branded by the accusation of “imbalance” Today they allow them to rethink themselves as authorized “reorderers” of knowledge and roles. ancestral? How do ancestors reintegrate into the future of their own trajectories? eleven In what powerful images or significant issues do they reunite with their advice, received through dreams, signs, conversations and stories? What are the abodes of attachment and the strategic installations that these women build as creative places of return? In the course of this research I accompanied the production processes of their stories of life, which they had started - or planned to start - before starting to work together. While we identify topics, beginnings and developments in the narrative of themselves, we also We share reflections on how to define politics, People, identity, past, motherhood, poverty and/or violence. These are stories in which experiences and details of life