Threads of Autonomy to Weave Solidarity – the Case of Transnational Mapuche Advocacy

Sebastian Garbe

13.00-13.45 (BST)

While international solidarity in the 20th century was mainly framed in favour of national liberation movement and tricontinental alternatives of socialist development towards social justice, after the end of the cold war, the quest for a socialist solidarity became increasingly sidelined. Especially with the insurrection of the Zapatistas in 1994 and the celebration of 500 years of decolonial resistance in Latin America, Indigenous and Native American movements across the Global South stepped into tricontinental spotlight and began to demand new forms and logics of international solidarity. This is because, neither socialist national liberation nor the neoliberal “end of history” put an end to colonial relations within formally independent nation-states. Amongst many others, the Indigenous Mapuche in today’s Chile and Argentina are key protagonists in the struggles for decolonisation in contemporary Latin America.

In my contribution, I would like to reconstruct the historical threads of the Mapuche resistance which are remembered and recreated to weave international but also domestic relations of solidarity. These threads are memories of an autonomous past which are activated within contemporary Mapuche mobilization and transnational advocacy and date back to precolonial times as well as to the resistance against the Spanish Crown and the invasion of the Mapuche territory by the Chilean state in the 19th century. But those experiences of autonomy, that inform contemporary transnational Mapuche advocacy the most, took place within tricontinental mobilization of the 20th century. In that context, colonised, Third World, or Indigenous people not only joined socialist internationalism but sometimes fought parallel battles against racism and coloniality within the shared struggles in solidarity with non-Indigenous parties, organizations, and movements.

Furthermore, the resistance against racism and coloniality was subsumed or even silenced under the assumed common goals of national libation in the Global South and socialist internationalism. In the Chilean case, the contribution of the Mapuche movement to the socialist struggle, culminating in the electoral victory of the Unidad Popular in 1970, but also the repression and persecution of Mapuche movements and organizations under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are largely forgotten today. While international solidarity with the Chilean people after 1973 was supported by Chilean exiles in the Global North, also Mapuche politicians, unionists, and students fled the country and began to organize themselves as a diaspora.

A noteworthy peculiarity of that moment is that those Mapuche, who left the country, began to organize themselves not as Chileans but as Mapuche, as a distinct and autonomous nationality increasingly aware of their shared experience of racial and colonial discrimination back home. Through their diasporic experience, the Mapuche in Europe thus created an international solidarity network with their society, whose threads are taken up by the second generation Mapuche diaspora in Europa today. They re-activate the memories of autonomy of their parents and ancestors in order to continue weaving relations of solidarity within Europe and with Wallmapu – the historical territory of the Mapuche.

Sebastian Garbe, born in 1986, lives in Frankfurt/Germany and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Fulda, where he is the coordinator of the Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences and the Research Centre on “Human Rights and Social Justice”. He obtained is PhD in sociology in 2021 at Justus-Liebig University Giessen, where he worked as a research associate and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology from 2013 until 2022. His teaching and research were awarded with the Dr.-Herbert-Stolzenberg-Award for the Study of Culture in 2017 and 2020 and focuses on post- and decolonial theory as well as on protest, solidarity, and social movements. In the past years, he was engaged in international solidarity and human rights activism with the Mapuche and is part of the frankfurt postkolonial collective.