Talk: We Are Charrúa Women: From Negation to Re-Existence In Our Body-Territory
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February 26, 2021 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
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Charrúa women have gone through dispossession, exclusion, and negation that left marks on their collective memory and body-territory. This genocidal process did not end in 19th-century Uruguay, but continues today and manifests itself every time that institutions or civil society denies their existence as an indigenous people. For fifteen years, together with Charrúa sisters from Argentina, Charrúa women from Uruguay have been working to demolish hegemonic narratives of the market and state. As subjects of legal right, they are reconfiguring their existence and re-existence in their great ancestral-territory-body. This collective search has led Mónica Michelena to academic spaces.
In 2011, Michelena began an investigation with rural Charrúa women in Uruguay’s interior to question the nation-state’s devices of invisibility and to expose counter-memories as part of an attempt to disarm the social and symbolic representation of their extinction. Through a methodological approach based on collaborative ethnography, Michelena’s research aims to rearm the great quillapí of memory. The metaphor of quillapí – a leather cape made from patchwork – implies that each woman is the bearer of a small piece of memory and, among all, they are sewing together its scraps. Down this path, Charrúa women began to slowly gain recognition from the Uruguayan feminist movement, in a slow process of internal decolonization.
Mónica Michelena is Secretary of the Charrúa Nation Council and former Advisor on Indigenous Affairs for Uruguay’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series and is cosponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB History Department, UCSB Feminist Studies Department, UCSB Latin American and Iberian Studies, UC San Diego Latin American Studies Program, UCSD Critical Gender Studies, and UCSD Institute for Arts and Humanities
