Lo que no se está diciendo en los discursos oficiales de San Martin de los Andes

Abstract

On February the 4th. 2016, the city of San Martín de los Andes celebrated its 118 anniversary. Taking the anniversary’s ceremony as an ethnographic case, this article has as its principal objective the acknowledgement of the valorization of the socio-historical processes of alterization and subalterization that are referred to in the official discourses. The corpus of analysis includes the official message from the local Mapuche community, which focuses on the discourses that were enunciated during the anniversary ceremony. What was said on those discourses encouraged the Mapuche community to write a reply. In those discourses, processes of alterization and subalterization that the local mapuche community endured were brought back to the scene, helping to create a certain type of San Martín de los Andes’s identity, and specifically around the construction of aboriginality and the exclusion of the Mapuche citizen from San Martín de los Andes’s official history. At the same time, the valorization of this processes is once again raising questions about interculturalism, about the construction of the history of San Martín de los Andes, and about the exclusion or inclusion of the Mapuche community in correlation with the notions of State and Nation which take part on the official discourse, and with the utopic threshold of alterity that is being set.