An expert on indigenous geography in South America will deliver the next lecture in the Latino/Latin American Studies Fall 2021 series, Race and Climate Change, at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.

Viviana Huiliñir-Curío will present online at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 12. Advanced registration for the Zoom Webinar is available here.

This free presentation will discuss how forms of mobility of the Mapuche shape landscapes in the southern Andes Mountains of Chile.

The Mapuche are an indigenous group whose ancestral lands, called Wallmapu in Mapudungen (the language of the Mapuche people), are located in southern Chile and Argentina. This group has a long history of resistance to the colonization of the Southern Cone, a geographic and cultural region composed of the southernmost areas of South America, mostly south of the Tropic of Capricorn.

The landscapes associated with specific routes and mobilities of the Mapuche people in the Andes account for both past and present mobilities, and these mobilities challenge and resist the processes of territorial dispossession by colonial settlers.

Huiliñir-Curío is a Mapuche geographer who graduated with a master’s degree in Applied Social Sciences from the University of La Frontera in Temuco, Araucanía Region, Chile, in 2016. She is currently a Ph.D. student of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Since 2013, she has published more than a dozen research articles related to indigenous geography in South America. In her work, she examines the various forms of mobility used by the Mapuche in Wallmapu within the context of the Andean mountain region and the globalization of rural spaces. She looks at how this impacts the production of Mapuche social memory.

She has also been exploring the formation of alternative spaces through projects promoted by groups of migrants who have settled in the mountain range of southern Chile, as well as the development of private conservation projects in this sector.

“My research interest is the intersection between mobility studies, human geography and political ecology, with special emphasis on indigenous issues,” Huiliñir-Curío states in her profile on the University of Colorado website. “I am especially interested in social memory, colonialism, indigenous thought and anti-colonialism research methodologies, lifestyle migration, indigenous land rights and mountain protected areas.”

This Latino/Latin American Studies program at CSB/SJU organizes every semester a public events series on a relevant contemporary theme.