Pascual Coña’s testimonial work: Verbal art, linguistic and cultural documentation, metadiscursive struggles

Abstract

As a cultural text based on deeply conflicted social accents, Pascual
Coña’s testimonial work continues to question different generations
of readers-addresses, asking each of them —and us— to take a position, to make an interpretation of the events and the participants which would always be historically located. In the light of other previous and contemporary readings, this article examines Coña’s diverse and even opposite footings across time in three dissimilar though related contexts: discourse production, the nütram ‘stories’ included in the book, and the circulation contexts for the published work. From a perspective that distinguishes in this work the interaction of multiple voices, the analysis incorporates the
notion of contact zone, understood as the social space in which geographically and historically separated peoples come into contact and establish lasting relations based on coercion, inequality, and conflict (Pratt, 1992). It concludes that Pascual Coña’s work, on the one hand, manages to subvert the «author» role that Moesbach allocated to himself in the first edition and, on the other, it also gains profound sense within the framework of the saga of narratives circulating in the area about the tragic fates of leading Mapuche longko on both sides of the Andes after their defeat.