‘Our existence is the resistance’: features of Mapuche slow resistance

This article examines the Mapuche people’s slow resistance in Argentina, focusing on practices of (re)signification of settler–colonial narratives, through the politics of present-making (making one’s presence felt). In response to recent legislative efforts to delegitimise Mapuche identity and land rights, and historical processes of absencing the Mapuche, the paper argues that resistance here is not just immediate confrontation, but a sustained and strategic process over time. This resistance is rooted in memory, territory and identity through a maintained inscription in the land. By rejecting both the state’s de-recognition of Indigenous people and the selective recognition of the indio permitido, Mapuche activists assert a radical politics of re-knowledge, linking land and identity through emic narratives. This resistance is slow as processes of (re)signification build on a constructive repetition of signs over time.