Los porqués del "de acá nos van a sacar muertos". Procesos de recuperación de tierras en la Patagonia Norte

Abstract

After putting the strife of the mapuche-tewelche people into its historical context since the return to democracy, this article identifies how processes of land retrieval stage different dimensions of the disagreement, and have modified in time vocabularies and grammars of dispute. Through the analysis of different ways of performing the right to recover / return / safeguard / control the territory, we seek to understand two things. First, the ways in which these practices have prompted transformations in the political arena, while they have been themselves modified by changes in state policies. Second, the ways in which different cases frame themselves into regimes of historicity that account for and make public different dimensions of mapuche-tewelche own senses of belonging and becoming. The study is based upon an extended ethnographic fieldwork that has allowed us to register how mapuche-people themselves have produced critical knowledge about changing contexts and transformed their practices accordingly. Resorting to our fieldwork experiences, we trace how practices of land retrieval have acquired a changing dynamics because of their being in permanent dialogue with transformations in their surroundings.