The Mapuche Movement and Chile’s Constitutional Reform
Date & Time
26 September 2pm - 4pm Delivered in a mixture of Spanish and English, with synchronous translation.Venue
George Washington Browne Room, Edinburgh Central Library, George IV Bridge, EH1 1EGDescription
We welcome the Indigenous Mapuche historian Fernando Pairican from the Universidad Católica in Chile.
This talk will address the impact of Chile’s recent “estallido social”, a social uprising which in ways took the form of an anti-colonial revolt, with the toppling of monuments that recall the violence of colonialism on the Mapuche. This uprising paved the way for the new constitutional process, and the role of Mapuche within it.
The second part of the paper will explore the how those occupying “Reserved Seats” within the constituent assembly led to the consolidation of a gradualist path to Mapuche autonomy by proposing Chile as a Plurinational State.
Finally, we will explore why this proposal was rejected and why the current second constituent process has profoundly reduced Mapuche issues, revealing how racism continues to be a fundamental weapon for the construction of politics in times of uncertainty. The argument is that rather than being seen as a defeat, the constituent process was a point of arrival for the gradualist Mapuche movement and that it increased its number of voters in the second election to have an indigenous representative in the drafting of the new constitution.
Key speakers
- Fernando Pairican
Partner institutions
- Centre for Contemporary Latin American Studies