translated from Spanish: Daniela Catrileo: The feminist movement in Chile “obeys the white and hegemonic feminisms”

The renowned Mapuche poet and philosophy professor, Daniela Catrileo, belongs to the women’s collective “Rangiñtul Ewfü “, whose objective is to defend the rights of Mapuche women under a premise that keeps distance from” white and hegemonic feminism thought from other realities “.
This organization of empowerment and resistance, appeals to be the voice and reflection of its territory and daily life, so that “Rangiñtulewfü” is constantly talking with “political bets, genealogies, ancestral memories and community knowledge” own of The community, explains Catrileo to the counter. 
“We consider it important to say that there is no feminist movement within the people, but rather communities, collectivities and individualities who are thinking about how to combat colonialism and the neoliberal model day by day,” he emphasizes.
The challenges of Mapuche women
While the various feminist currents agitate the masses and install the discussion of gender violence and women’s rights, from the Mapuche collective, they believe that the challenge is “to try to generate a political project as a people, which in turn can Articulate together with other peoples, social movements and collectivities. ”
In this sense, for Daniela Mapuche women should bet on “a tissue of multiple voices where we can see the common oppressions that we live as diasporic beings, displaced and marginalized by the western forms of official politics.”
-What is the critique of the feminist movement that woke up in Chile?
-Our criticism is that much of the feminist movements that have emerged this last time are very obedient to the imposition of agenda of the white and hegemonic feminisms. Women who come from other bodies and realities, be they social classes, migrants, indigenous, sexual, can not be folded to a universal demand that is not aware of the realities and historicities of our peoples.
“This question of being feminists is perfect, gives me a lot of suspicion,” says Daniela and adds that “imposing cross-sectional demands on territories with their own life forms seems to me deeply colonialist.”
In this sense, Catrileo considers that “there is little interest in recognizing other struggles that do not come from the urban centers, Europe, the global north and the bourgeois policies of privileged women.”
This is why the writer believes that what is lacking is “self-criticism, a fundamental question for political arming.”

Original source in Spanish