Abstract

During the seventeenth century thousands of Mapuche women and children were displaced from them homes and taken to the regions of Concepción and Santiago where they worked in the Spanish homes and farms. While most of them came from the Araucanía, there was a small group that were born in one of the friendly Indian villages of the region of Concepción. This investigation analyzes what occurred when some Mapuche women from this second group decided to return and populate their ancestral lands in the region of Concepción. What makes these cases even more interesting is that each of them received the title of Cacica of an indigenous community with its associated lands, even though each was married to a Spaniard and had mixed blood children. © 2023, Universidad de Concepcion. All rights reserved.