ABSTRACT
Indigenous groups in Chile have not been unaffected by modern life and the worldwide expansion of modern capitalism. In the early 1990s, Chile's National Census created a social, economic and demographic approach to establishing local indigenous populations' distribution and characteristics. The Mapuche, along with other First Nation peoples, have been an important part of the larger Chilean social mobilization, and the struggle for democracy. The Mapuche population inhabiting the Metropolitan Region constitutes 30 per cent of Chile's total Mapuche population. According to Jose Bengoa, the Mapuche population inhabiting rural areas tends toward permanent or temporal migration to Chilean cities, precisely because those rural areas are in especially precarious conditions and material poverty. Mapuche communities represent not just spaces of refuge, but spaces of cultural creativity and resistance. Leaving one's origins presents Mapuche people with an individuation process, but also a de-terriorialization process.
