Senses of Painful Experience: Memory of the Mapuche People in Violent Times

Abstract

The "Conquest of the Desert" is the official tale about the formation of the Argentine nation-state, in which the violent invasion of indigenous territory acquires the narrative place of a heroic and foundational deed. An event built on silences more than images of the past, the temporality of the Conquest of the Desert seems to encompass only the narrow timeframe during which certain "battles" took place and "the last Caciques surrendered". In the memory of the Mapuche People, this event (described as a "genocide") brings together other social experiences, produces other silences, and generates other images of the past. But the political potential of mapuche narratives does not lie solely in the description of the painful and the unspeakable - such as physical torture, forced confinement, hunger and misery, rape and the deaths of children - but also in the implicit complaints and in the agency orientations and presuppositions within the epistemic and ontological frameworks of past. Different temporalities, historical agents, and significant events structure the poetic forms with which the memory organizes the sensory world, in which they take on mapuche meanings and experiences of the past and the present. This chapter is an analysis of the events of the Conquest of the Desert from the viewpoint of memory that has, since those critical events, focused on restoring and rebuilding the People.