Montserrat Madariaga-Caro

Montserrat Madariaga-Caro earned a B.A. in Humanities at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile (2007); a B.A. in Social Communication and the title of Journalist at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile (2008); an M.A. in Chilean and Hispano-American Literatures at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2015); and a Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures with a Graduate Portfolio in Native American and Indigenous Studies at The University of Texas at Austin (2022).

Dr. Madariaga-Caro’s research focuses on the intersections of Indigenous poetics, aesthetics, and micropolitics of land, life, and justice. Her current book project illuminates how the works of Indigenous Mapuche poets and artists invigorate land relations among humans and other ecological bodies and work against settler-colonialism, racial extractive capitalism, and compulsory cis-hetero socializations. Dr. Madariaga-Caro elaborates upon the notion of “terricidio,” that is, the murdering of Indigenous lands and life by settler nation-states and racial extractive capitalism, a term coined by the Indigenous collective Movimiento de Mujeres y Diversidades Indígenas por el Buen Vivir, based in Argentina, with whom she collaborates.

Dr. Madariaga-Caro’s courses are generally taught in Spanish, and their special topics are related to Indigenous land relations, poetics, and pedagogies, as well as settler-colonial racialization, mestizo sensibilities, and anti-patriarchal literary, artistic, and activist work in Latin American (also known as Abiayala and Indoamerica). Madariaga-Caro is on the steering committees of Vassar’s Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALS) and Vassar’s Community-Engaged Intensives in the Humanities (CEIH) of the Office of Community-Engaged Learning.

Pronouns: She/ella, but “they/elle” is also welcomed because life isn’t binary.