Mapuche Collective Ethos in the Opening Speeches of their Representatives in the Chilean Constitutional Convention (2021-2022)

Abstract

On June 4, 2021, the work of the Chilean Constituent Convention (CC) (2021-2022) began with the participation of seven representatives of the Mapuche people. For the first time, the largest American native group in Chilean territory participated in a collegiate body with significant representation. In this way, the Mapuche people becomes a new political actor in a scenario that is also unique and original (Ojeda-Pereira, 2022; Padilla, Rodríguez & Espinosa, 2022). These circumstances give us the opportunity to study the discursive construction of the public image of this native group depicted by the representatives themselves. The notion of collective ethos, understood as the identity image built by the enunciator in his speech (Orkibi, 2008; Amossy, 2018), is analyzed in the opening speeches delivered by each of the constituents. Our question is: how the collective ethos of the Mapuche people is built in the opening speeches of their representatives? This research was carried out from the semiodiscursive perspective of discourse analysis (Charaudeau, 2003, 2006, 2021); specifically, the seven discourses given by the conventional Mapuche constituents within the framework of the work of the CC were analyzed. In the opening speeches, a homogeneous collective ethos has been privileged and, in some sense, an idealized image of the Mapuche people has been used for the legitimization of historical demands in the context of the constitutional process. At the same time, this image distances itself, on the one hand, from the Mapuche people who recognize themselves as ethnically mixed and, on the other, from the Chilean population who see their own origins in the Mapuche people.