Agua-cuerpo-territorio. Las cicatrices y reexistencias de las mujeres rurales en el Maule Sur precordillerano de Chile

Abstract

For the rural communities that inhabit the Andes Mountains, both in Chile and Argentina, water has been the lung of our territories. However, in Chile, this common good began to fade in our mountains as of September 11, 1973, a date that marked one of the greatest scars in the country’s history, the most painful being the creation of the 1981 water code. This meant the almost total privatization of our waters, a cruel dispossession that continues to advance unscrupulously on the “body-territory” of the rural women who live there, women who have finally remained in the territories subalternized by progress and the modern world. , despised by urban onlookers and always desired by neo-extractivism.These words will try to weave a triad «Water-Body-Territory», as an interwoven relationship from our ancestral memories. Three dimensions that mark rural women in their daily lives, crossed by hydroelectric plants, transit stations, forestry companies and monocultures, all of them blacksmiths in the marking of the impoverishment of the territories.However, rural women from everyday life and the collective try to break the symbols displayed on municipal shields, such as the image of a hydroelectric plant, to show and make visible «other» ways of living. Perhaps it is the peasant or rural life, but they are counter-hegemonic practices at the end of the day, in resistance and re-existence of the «Water-Body-Territory» in the invisible Maule Sur, Chile.