Impacto de la instalación de la Central Hidroeléctrica Ralco en la identidad y memoria colectiva del pueblo pehuenche

Abstract

The Pehuenche are a native people of Chile. Located in the mountain range of our country. Throughout history, the ethnic group has been harmed by numerous actions that respond to economic interests and not the welfare of its inhabitants. One of these actions is an energy project that considers the installation of four hydroelectric power plants in the Alto Bío Bío sector of the VIII region where several Pehuenche communities were affected by the installation of the power plants, particularly by the Ralco Power Plant, due to the magnitude of the project. We therefore decided to investigate the impact of these events on the identity and collective memory of the Pehuenche people. To carry it out we conducted a qualitative study that allows the construction of knowledge from the information collected in the field. The research process focused on the phenomenological approach, since our intention was to question and to know the phenomena that people have experienced according to their meanings and subjectivities given to such events. Due to our interest in approaching this phenomenon from the experience lived by those affected, we work with the "life story" technique, which allowed us to obtain an understanding of the meaning that people assign to their own acts, their articulation with others and institutions, their way of seeing life and the beliefs they have of the world, as well as the search for social identity that exists within the context in which they live. We collected nine stories of one group of adults and one group of teenagers. To analyze the problem, we situate ourselves from two theoretical perspectives; On one hand, political psychology is in charge of jointly analyzing psychological phenomena with political facts, maintains the links between the emotional and the rational, and is concerned with the historical and cultural nature of the events seeking social rupture and the construction of social identity. And the psychology of liberation is concerned with the bleeding issues of Latin America, stories such as the westernization of native peoples.