Mujeres mapuche en la diáspora y el retorno al wallmapu: Entre micro-resistencias de género y despojos coloniales

The forced occupation of the Wallmapu, the Mapuche territory, though a military campaign known as Pacification of Araucanía, contributed to the coerced migration of Mapuche people to the cities. This article delves, from an analytical and political perspective, into the experiences of Mapuche women who have worked in domestic service in Santiago de Chile, the capital city of the country with the highest number of Mapuche women. This is a multisited ethnographic research comprising the regions of El Biobío, La Araucanía, and Los Ríos, and the city of Santiago. The decolonized and decolonizing methodological perspectives used involved knowledge and social conventions characteristic of the Mapuche people. The methodological strategy included participating observation. Thirty two Mapuche women, who lived in the diaspora and have returned to the Wallmapu, participated. In-depth interviews were carried out with twenty women. Four discussion groups were conducted with 12 women, including two of the interviewed women, in the city of Santiago and in the regions of La Araucanía and Los Ríos. The findings show colonial continuities in racialized work spaces, which manifest themselves in a variety of class, race, and gender clashes, and which dialectically give rise to subjectivities and everyday micro-resistances that shape the Mapuche diaspora identity of these women.