Unsettling Hegemonic Images of the People”. En: Conference Re-positioning “el pueblo

DELRIO, WALTER; RAMOS, ANA

Baltimore, Maryland

Conferencia; Critical approaches to the popular in Latin American history, culture, art and society; 2007

Program in Latin American Studies, The Johns Hopkins University

The political agency of the Mapuche-Tehuelche communities and organizations of the Province of Chubut in Patagonia have been tightening three hegemonic historical constructions of “people”, which have been used by the political elite for the last century in order to define them. The first one, that of “people of the nation”, has included certain indigenous peoples as the basis of the origins of the “national being”, by setting physical borders and belongings according to a current national territory that has been retrospectively extended to the past, as far back as the beginnings of the European colonization. Secondly, and related with the first one, the construction of “indigenous people” in academic and political discourses has imposed discrete limitation to the recognition of their indigenous identity and belonging. Finally, political parties, military governments and the broad spectrum of the political class have used the construction of “people” as peasant-worker masses to establish social control, political “clientelismo” and the amplification of the electoral basis,. We have analyzed the Mapuche-Tehuelche case to understand how the indigenous agency tenses the limits of the nation, and the ideas of people and territory in the nationalist discourse, the anthropological ethnic maps and the political programs of the major national political parties.