Introduction

Contemporary and historical expressions of global inequalities produce connections between different groups and actors across the globe. When these groups and actors choose to stand up against such inequalities and begin to organize, they often create new forms of solidarity. This means that these solidarities are both a product of and a reaction against global inequalities such as capitalism, coloniality, racism and patriarchy.

Further, these inequalities permeate spaces of solidarity in which resources and privileges are unequally distributed among the actors involved. Therefore, expressions of solidarity can also be critiqued and challenged as being entangled with global inequalities. Such critiques and challenges call for solidarity to be detached and disentangled from its own implication in these inequalities. The aim of this chapter is to explore these paradoxes of entanglement and detachment in the context of translocal solidarity. Engaging with contemporary expressions of international solidarity with the struggle of the Indigenous Mapuche in Chile, the contribution discusses a number of decolonial critiques and challenges the solidarity practices give rise to. On the one hand, it seeks to understand how these expressions of solidarity are entangled within global inequalities such as unequal power and race relations between the involved actors. On the other, it asks whether it is possible to disentangle solidarity from such expressions of global inequality by discussing decolonial critiques and challenges of these sociopolitical practices, starting from critical statements by the Mapuche actors.

In the last few decades, particularly due to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Indigenous human rights advocate Rigoberta Menchu in 1992 and the uprising of the Zapatistas in 1994, Indigenous struggles for decolonization have received more and more attention globally. These struggles aim to decolonize local and regional expressions of global inequality, particularly the internal colonial relations of power within the Latin American nation-states (Rivera Cuscanqui 2018; Quijano 2014). International solidarity with these struggles challenges us to reconsider the ways in which more traditional forms of trade/labour union and socialist solidarity have been understood.

The chapter begins by introducing the notion of a cultural politics of autonomy as a historically embedded sociopolitical and cultural strategy of the Mapuche to challenge local articulations of colonial power. I will argue that this strategy is also present within contemporary solidarity efforts and that it disentangles solidarity from unequal power and race relations and re-entangles it as a rhizomatic network.