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Abstract

The present work aims to fill a vacuum in the studies of mapuche poetry from a consideration of it as one of the types of mapuche intercultural discourse, that is to say, one of the types of discourse generated from the interaction with global culture, and not from the culture itself.

One aspect in which his poetry coincides with other intercultural mapuche discourses, as for example, public discourse, is its performative functionalities, relevantly linked to the expressive, testimonial or identifying manifestation of the texts.

Due to the complexity of the problem, from a methodological viewpoint this article pretends to assume it in part, and only in some defining aspects which will have to be complemented and corrected in the future.

With greater exactitude, then, the intention is to understand mapuche poetry as a present day intellectual phenomenon, stopping over its public dimension through the analysis of two of its semantic macrostructures which develop the identity discourse: the modern myth or utopia of the "Mapuche State", and the recollection, search and reactualization of the ancestral memory, in the work of five authors: Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, Jaime Huenún, Bernardo Colipán and Adriana Pineda.