Mapuches & José Bengoa

Today I will write about Jose Bengoa, a Chilean anthropologist and historian that is especialized in the indigenous group "Mapuche" and their historical conflict with the Chilean State. Bengoa is a defensor of human rights and always he has been work through actions that try to protect the patrimonial memory of our ancestors, and with this, deal with the injustice performed by the industries and the Chilean politics, that is only keep helping to colonist ideas from the big enterprises.

Jose Bengoa born in Santiago de Chile at 1945, same place where he will play an important rol in the research of the Mapuche History, so that later he wrote his most important work called "Historias de los antiguos Mapuches del Sur". The landscape that characterize our country for those years, talked about instability after that our democracy was destroyed by Pinochet. For every writer that would describe the panoramic vision of the reality in Chile after 1973, it meant a big problem. This fact represent a big issue due the dictatorship was the enemy of the social sciences that provided documentation in real time. Furthermore, many people including Bengoa, loose their academy jobs while the neoliberalist ideas advanced by the latin american region.

I admire the hard work what make the people that try to defend our cultures from the claws of the imperialist ideas, especially when it comes about our ancestors that prepare their own legacy, that has been historically kidnapped.