Descolonización, fronteras y lugar:

desafiando la exclusión a través de la relacionalidad en la experiencia de Trekaleyin, Alto Bío Bío

Abstract

The way in which we understand place and relations between places is of key importance and has symbolic and material consequences. Interweaving current debates around place, scales, decolonization, indigeneity and hybridity with the experience of Trekaleyin, a MapuchePewenche tourism initiative, this article questions frontier colonial imaginaries and suggests that Trekaleyin is developing a relational construction of place. Through practices and discourses that are both ancient and innovative, members of Trekaleyin are creating geographic imaginaries and subjectivities that allow them to expand their possibilities for territorial defense, wellbeing and participation, as well as the decolonization of mental and physical frontiers that destabilize the binaries and hierarchies of the local/global and the remote/connected. This paper seeks to promote a conversation between knowledges and practices of diverse trajectories that emphasise the urgency and huge possibilities of geography in the construction of more plural, just and respectful ways of cross-cultural coexistence, in practical and conceptual terms.