Pascual Coña: Testimonios de sobrevivientes

Abstract

The process of the construction of meaning in a text can be observed in paratextual concepts such as “author”, “title” and “prologue”. The fact that, over time, a book like Lonco Pascual Coña ñi tuculpazugun Testimonio de un cacique mapuche has suffered changes in the assignment of authorship, title and editors from one edition to the next and that new, interpretative prologues have been added, is a vindication demanded by the mapuche voices of the text. All efforts on the part of the non-mapuche authors of the original prologues to “reduce” or “limit” the text to a “civilizatory” discourse or to transform the mapuche into a “useful citizen” in eurocentric terms have not been sufficient to cancel the intensity of those mapuche voices marked by cultural resistance and survival.