Instrumentos de recolección de información.

This chapter has discussed the ways in which Mapuche activists engage with the new opportunities for participation that become available to them. What is clear is that these opportunities are often the result of their own mobilization and work with other social activists. In other words, indigenous activists may be “invited” to participate but only after they mobilize for their own political goal of territorial autonomy, as the case of Neuquén’s constitutional assembly, the Lanin National Park co-management project, and the appropriation of a development project goals illustrate. Mobilization, however, does not always result in accommodation and recognition of indigenous rights.

As the following chapter shows, multicultural citizenship and the recognition of new spaces for indigenous participation do not always entail the decolonization of state practices, resource redistribution, or social justice. Mapuche struggles to secure control over the territories and resources they rely on seem to mark the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism in Northern Patagonia. By demanding collective rights to territory and challenging the state as a pueblo nación originario, Mapuche activists attempt to challenge the limitations of neoliberal multiculturalism. The chapter also describes aspects of the strategy of land occupation by Mapuche activists to pressure the state for

further recognition of territorial autonomy as well as the state’s reaction and

criminalization of indigenous demands. The contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism thus become evident through the reluctance of state practices to recognize and secure indigenous control over the territories they use or inhabit. In fact, since Mapuche activists have adopted the strategy of supporting recuperaciones territoriales (territorial re-

occupations), it has become evident that the politics of multicultural tolerance embedded in neoliberalized forms of indigenous citizenship have reached a limit.

Chapter 6

6

Territorial autonomy in times of neoliberal

multiculturalism

Throughout this dissertation, I have been arguing that contemporary Mapuche politics in Northern Patagonia must be understood as a process that involves negotiation as well as ongoing conflict with the state. In some contexts, those instances of negotiation and conflict lead to particular forms of accommodation and new spaces for indigenous participation within the institutional structure of the state. Furthermore, territorial

autonomy must be seen as a central component of indigenous citizenship claims (Yashar 2005) and the consolidation of neoliberal multiculturalism (Hale 2002). As the previous chapter has shown, there are instances when new spaces of indigenous participation offered by the neoliberal citizenship regime (often as a result of indigenous mobilization) have been relevant for Mapuche activists in their quest for territorial autonomy and cultural recognition. The fact that those spaces are offered as a result of political mobilization makes them an interesting point of departure for analyzing how Mapuche activists respond once they are “invited” to participate. However, Mapuche activism today is not limited to these spaces. In the context of the expansion of extractive industries in Northern Patagonia since the 1990s, Mapuche communities have been involved in defending the territories they use or inhabit and in demanding the recognition by the state of new places as Mapuche territory to secure control over them.

The mobilization around demands and protection of territory is also, as Karen Engle (2010) suggests, a way for indigenous peoples to attach the defence of a territory to their existence as peoples, a connection that neoliberal multiculturalism attempts to break. Engle argues, for example, that legal mechanisms and other attempts to defend

indigenous culture often fail to realize that tolerance vis-à-vis cultural heritage does not address, “the underlying economic, social, and political inequalities of which indigenous

peoples generally bear the brunt” (2010, 143). In other words, indigenous culture is often defended, under neoliberal multiculturalism, as what she calls “intangible” heritage, ignoring the fact that land (and the conflicts that surround it) forms the material basis of indigenous cosmologies. Moreover, the author argues that while some indigenous activists have engaged in pursuing the protection of cultural heritage, “they have not acquired the type of self-determination or autonomy that indigenous movements have sought since at least the 1970s” (2010, 148). Furthermore, Engle suggests that, “to the extent that intangible heritage contains a relatively “thin” concept of culture (e.g., dress, festivals, art, and the like), it falls well short of constituting a threat to the neoliberal, multicultural state” (2010, 149). The author concludes that these regimes of protection have a “disciplinary effect” in which, echoing the work of Charles Hale, any attempts to “transgress the boundaries of neoliberal multiculturalism” end with isolation and

dismissal provoking a separation of cultural heritage from “the very indigenous peoples from whom it is thought to emanate” (2010, 149).

This chapter elaborates on the political strategy of land reoccupations carried out by Mapuche communities as a way to activate their claims for territorial autonomy. The chapter also focuses on the main state response to this strategy, namely, the

criminalization of Mapuche demands, including arrests, imprisonment, and violence. The goal of this chapter is two-fold: first, to show how Mapuche collective identity is shaped in this context of ongoing conflict; and, second, to show how the limitations of neoliberal multiculturalism operate in specific settings. With this discussion I hope to explore how the collective political identity of the Mapuche is embedded in a broader political context of changing citizenship regimes and state forms of government over indigenous peoples. The chapter begins by addressing the centrality of territorial claims for indigenous peoples as well as the significance that Mapuche activists give to the notion of territory.