Critical frameworks of an urban emergence of Mapuche people. Chilean post-dictatorship and its indigenous symptom

Abstract

This article develops some socio-historical and political-cultural coordinates which allow for a critical understanding of the conditions of subjectivity process emergence of indigenous Mapuche from the city, within a framework of the post-dictatorship "cultural hegemony" in Chile. Starting with an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenon of forced migration, to the situation of the Mapuche in the city, and to the return of the “Indigenous Question” during the nineties in Latin America, it interrogates the structural framework these urban process were based on. Thus, it identifies the "necessary" conjunction between the constitutive violence of the Chilean nation-state sovereign with the ever-increasing advancement of the pattern of capital accumulation. From there, it argues that it is possible to be observed in the conditions of irruption of these urban indigenous processes, tensions of the continual renovation of the mentioned link that operates as a matrix of territorialization, “othering”, and dispossession. This in light of multiculturalism as its ideological device of legitimation and domination.