Experiences of Resilience and Mapuche Community Based Tourism in the Pre-Cordilleran Territories of Panguipulli, Southern Chile

Abstract

In Latin America, community resilience has emphasized the solidarity capacities and strengths of indigenous communities to face and proactively overcome adversities derived from political and social violence. This is the case of Mapuche communities linked to community based tourism in pre-cordilleran areas of southern Chile. This article analyzes tourism experiences of these Mapuche communities, based on a qualitative exploratory and descriptive approach, in order to determine their relationship with community resilience processes. The conclusion is that community based tourism has contributed to absorbing external disturbances associated with the processes of territorial dispossession, colonization, and extractive and neoliberal policies that these communities face, resist, and overlap without losing their identity. This tourism also reinforces processes of cultural revitalization of communities, connected social capacities, and development of organizational strategies to achieve the collective desire for a favorable future associated with their life plans.